Today I’d like to invite you to learn how to use my Archetype Oracle Cards Deck to find more clarity, love, freedom of choice and bring joy and peace to every aspect of your life.
Some history of Archetypes
The first person who has been recorded to mention Archetypes was Plato.
Plato called them forms and described them as the pure characteristics of a ‘thing’.
I think of this as the way we think of a human, or a fox, or a tree.
We know what it means when we hear the word, and we have a picture of the ideal form in mind, yet all that exists in reality are variations of that ideal, the individual in all its complexity, that we often refuse to see and prefer to stick to our ideal or fabricated image of it.
The word archetype originally comes from Greek and could be translated as ‘original pattern from which copies are made’ Wikipedia which further illustrates this point.
In the last century, the Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung familiarized a wider audience with the concept of archetypes, when he used them to describe unconscious patterns of the human psyche, such as the mother, father or child archetype or that of the maiden or wise old man or woman.
Jung described these Archetypes as ‘a tendency to form such representations of a motif’, which he saw as inherent in all humans, as universal.
He viewed this representation of certain forms or archetypes that he recognized again and again in many of his clients as a process that was happening entirely in the unconscious.
So, when we become a mother, for example, we unconsciously copy the behaviour of our mothers because that’s the behaviour that we, unconsciously, link to that role.
That also leads to the assumption that, we all have slightly different ideas of archetypes, though we might be able to identify the same ones.
As an example: What I believe to be motherly or fatherly qualities might not be the same for you, though we can surely agree on some of the same characteristics.
More recently, Caroline Myss has been using Archetypes as a way to help us understand ourselves and our path in this life better by suggesting that each of us has 12 main archetypes that show up in different intensities in different phases of our life.
You can read more about that in her wonderful book ‘Sacred Contracts’, or learn about this more deeply in her Sacred Contracts online course.
In the way she uses archetypes, their characteristics give us a better understanding of ourselves, as in giving us the option to see ourselves in some archetypes more than in others to direct us to our purpose in life.
And lastly, archetypes are also often used for storytelling.
We’re all familiar with the hero, victim or villain archetype that appear in films and stories everywhere.
Joseph Campbell most famously wrote about the hero’s journey as a motif that can be found in its different variations throughout all cultures and times.
A new more fluid and practical approach
We live in a time in which we are becoming more conscious and aware of ourselves.
While Jung’s approach was clearly useful when he was working with it and paved the way to where we are today – today, we can go beyond just recognizing these patterns in ourselves and others to predict their behaviour or explain our own.
We can actively use these images, forms, concepts or archetypes to help us to develop or simply look at certain qualities in ourselves.
To be able to use Archetypes in a way that covers all aspects of our current lives and provides guidance and insight along the way, with whichever situation we find ourselves to be in, I’ve created a set of Oracle Cards which constitutes an archetypal-system to assist with that.
This system allows for a more practical and fluid use of Archetypes to raise consciousness and to empower ourselves through it.
As more and more people are moving from a fixed to a growth oriented mindset that is in alignment with the most recent research on epigenetics, we can also move beyond seeing ourselves as a representation of certain archetypes, but can instead use them to move from harmful behavioural patterns to more helpful ones.
As a coach and spiritual teacher, my main goal is to help you feel empowered to live a life that reflects your highest potential, and this archetypal-system can assist us to get there.
For me, living our full or highest potential can mean:
- To be at peace with ourselves, and the world around us (so we can act from love and not lack).
- Being able to act in alignment with our intentions (and to know what those intentions are).
- To find joy and fulfilment in everything we do (because we know why we do what we do).
If you are looking to find and make peace with yourself and the world around you, to be better able to act from a place of love and to support others, without losing yourself, working with these Archetype Oracle Cards can support you by giving you the clarity you need to do that, by looking at the positive and negative sides of each aspect/Archetype that you recognize in yourself.
Using the Archetype Oracle Cards as a traditional oracle cards set to learn more about your subconscious state (rather than to predict the future) by pulling a card or laying a spread of cards, can help you to get a better understanding of your intentions and needs in this moment.
As humans, we often make the world much more complicated than it needs to be.
If we would like to do everything we do with joy and love, we don’t have to do much more than to set our intentions to that.
Yet, in reality we often experience blockages or even make up excuses why we can’t possibly do that (our troubled past, our confusing and frustrating presence or our unpredictable future).
But the choice is ultimately ours to make, in every moment, again and again.
If we experience blockages and are conscious of them, we can find the help we need to resolve them, if we want to avoid more suffering for ourselves and others.
If we notice that we are making excuses, we can stop doing that, or find help to learn how to act more in alignment with our intentions as well.
I opened the CREATRIX School to assist with that in practice, and created the Oracle Cards for the same reason.
Using the Archetype Oracle Cards over a longer period of time and for different aspects of your life, will make this choice become more apparent to you.
To get a better understanding of this, you can start by reading more about the Source Cards Energy and Destroyer.
Archetype Oracle Cards
You can have a look at the whole deck of Archetype Oracle Cards here, and you can also buy posters of the cards in the shop now.