Archetypal+Symbols+Characters+and+Situations

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= Archetypes: Universal Symbols, Characters, and Situations =

SYMBOLS
A circle, sphere, or egg symbolizes wholeness, unity, and infinity. It is life in primordial form, a union between consciousness and unconsciousness.
 * Circle/Wheel**

Light usually suggests hope and renewal or intellectual illumination. Darkness implies the unknown, ignorance, or despair.
 * Light vs. Darkness**

Humanity has traditionally associated parts of the universe not accessible to humans with the dwelling places of the primordial forces that govern its world. The skies and mountain tops house the gods; the bowels of the earth contain the diabolic forces that inhabit its universe. Places of safety contrast sharply against the dangerous wilderness. Heroes are often sheltered for a time to regain health and resources.
 * Heaven vs. Hell**

Because water is necessary for life, it symbolizes fertility, growth, and the mystery of creation. Water also represents the cycle of birth, death, and resurrection; purification and redemption. The sea represents the mother of all life, spiritual mystery and infinity, timelessness and eternity, and the unconscious. Rivers also represent death, rebirth, the flowing of time into eternity, and the transitional phases of the life cycle. Rain can suggest a character’s spiritual rebirth. The desert represents death, nothingness, or hopelessness.
 * Water (Ocean) vs. Desert**

Places of safety contrast sharply with the dangerous wilderness. Heroes are often sheltered for a time to regain health and resources.
 * Haven vs. Wilderness**

A garden represents paradise, innocence, unspoiled beauty, and fertility.
 * Garden**

Fire represents knowledge, light, life, and rebirth. Ice (like desert) represents ignorance, darkness, sterility, and death. (When we began to control fire, we began to control our environment and our lives.)
 * Fire vs. Ice**

The sun represents creative energy, enlightenment, wisdom, and spiritual vision. It is the father principle associated with the passage of time and life. The rising sun represents birth; the setting sun represents death.
 * The Sun**

The wind, and also breath, symbolizes inspiration or conception, the soul or the spirit.
 * The Wind**

Birth, creation, enlightenment
 * Sunrise**

Death
 * Sunset**

Black: darkness, chaos, mystery, the unknown, death, the unconscious, evil, and sadness Red: blood, sacrifices, passion, disorder, love, and energy Blue: spirituality, depression Green: growth, sensation, hope, but also envy White: purity, death, sterility, and destruction in nature
 * Colors**

CHARACTERS
In its simplest form, this character is the one ultimately who may fulfill a necessary task and who will restore fertility, harmony, and/or justice to a community. The hero character is the one who typically experiences an initiation, who goes to through the community’s ritual(s), etc. Often he/she will possess innate wisdom and embody the characteristics of the young person from the provinces, the initiate, the pupil, and/or the son.
 * The Hero**

This hero is taken away as an infant or youth and raised by strangers. He or she later returns home as a stranger and able to recognize new problems and new solutions.
 * Young Person from the Provinces**

This is a young, innocent hero who, prior to the quest, must endure some training and ritual(s). The hero is usually innocent at this stage and often wears white.
 * The Initiate**

This individual serves as a teacher or counselor to the initiate. Sometimes the mentor works as a role model and often serves as a father or mother figure. The mentor teaches by example the skills necessary to survive the journey and the quest.
 * The Mentor**

These loyal companions are willing to face any number of perils in order to be together.
 * Hunting Group of Companions**

These individuals are like the noble sidekicks to the hero. Their duty is to protect the hero. The loyal retainer often reflects the hero’s nobility.
 * Loyal Retainers**

Some characters exhibit wisdom and understanding intuitively, as opposed to those supposedly in charge. Loyal retainers often exhibit this wisdom as they accompany the hero on the journey.
 * Innate Wisdom vs. Educated Stupidity**

This animal assists the hero and reflects that nature is on the hero’s side.
 * Friendly Beast**

This character represents evil incarnate. He or she may offer worldly gods, fame, or knowledge to the protagonist (hero) in exchange for possession of the soul or integrity. This figure’s main aim is to oppose the hero in his or her quest.
 * The Devil Figure**

This redeemable devil figure or servant to the devil figure is saved by the hero’s nobility or good heart.
 * The Evil Figure with the Ultimately Good Heart**

An animal or more usually a human whose death, often in a public ceremony, expiates some taint or sin that has been visited upon the community. This death often makes them a more powerful force in the society than when they lived.
 * The Scapegoat**

This figure is banished from a community for some crime (real or imagined) against his fellow man. The outcast is usually destined to become a wanderer from place to place.
 * The Outcast**

This monster, physical or abstract, is summoned from the deepest, darkest part of the human psyche to threaten the lives of the hero-heroine. Often it is a perversion or desecration of the human body.
 * The Creature of Nightmare**

This is the figure whose “inspired insanity” may lead to great illumination, often through mischance or misdirection
 * The Trickster/Joker/Fool**

This character is symbolic of birth, warmth, protection, fruition, abundance, growth, and fertility. She traditionally offers spiritual and emotional nourishment to those who she contacts. She is often dressed in earth colors and depicted with large breasts and hips symbolic of her childbearing capabilities.
 * The Earth Mother**

Characterized by sensuous beauty, this woman is the one to whom the protagonist is physically attracted and who ultimately bring about his downfall.
 * The Temptress**

This woman is a source of inspiration and a spiritual ideal, for whom the protagonist has an intellectual rather than a physical attraction.
 * The Platonic Ideal**

This woman, married to a man she sees as dull or distant, is attracted to a more exciting or interesting man.
 * The Unfaithful Wife**

This vulnerable woman must be rescued by the hero. She is often used as a trap to ensnare the unsuspecting hero.
 * The Damsel in Distress**

This witch, sorceress, or siren is associated with fear, danger, or death.
 * The Femme Fatale**

These two characters are engaged in a love affair that is fated to end in tragedy for one or both of them due to the disapproval of society, friends, family, or the gods or some tragic situation.
 * The Star-Crossed Lovers**

SITUATIONS
The hero undertakes some long journey during which he/she must perform impossible tasks, battle with monsters, solve unanswerable riddles, and overcome insurmountable obstacles in order to save the kingdom and perhaps marry the princess. This archetype describes the search for someone or some talisman which, when found and brought back, will restore fertility to a wasted land, the desolation of which is mirrored by a leader’s illness or disability.
 * The Quest**

This refers to what possibly superhuman feat must be accomplished in order to fulfill the ultimate goal. To save the kingdom, to win the fair lady, to identify himself so that he may reassume his rightful positions, the hero must perform some nearly superhuman deed. In many myths and stories, the hero must complete multiple tasks before completing he quest.
 * The Task**

The journey sends the hero in search for some truth or information necessary to restore fertility, justice, and/or harmony to the kingdom. The journey includes a series of trials and tribulations the hero must face along the way. Usually the hero descends into a real or psychological hell and is forced to discover the blackest truths, quite often concerning his own faults. Once the hero is at this lowest level, he must accept personal responsibility to return to the world of the living. A second use of this pattern is the depiction of a limited number of travelers on a sea voyage, bus ride or any other trip for the purpose of isolating them and using them as a microcosm of society.
 * The Journey**

In this plot, the hero undergoes a series of excruciating ordeals in passing from ignorance and immaturity to social and spiritual adulthood, that is, in becoming a full-fledged member of his/her social group. The initiation most commonly consists of three stages or phases: (1) separation, (2) transformation, (3) return. The initiation refers to a moment, usually psychological, in which an individual comes into maturity. He or she gains a new awareness into the nature of circumstances and problems and understands his/her responsibility for trying to resolve the dilemma. Typically, a hero receives a calling, a message or signal that he or she must make sacrifices and become responsible for getting involved in the problem. Often a hero will deny and question the calling, and ultimately, in the initiation, he/she accepts responsibility.
 * The Initiation**

The ritual refers to an organized ceremony that involves honored members of a give community and the initiate. This situation officially brings the young man/woman into the realm of the community’s adult world. Rituals are the actual ceremonies the initiate experiences that will mark his rite of passage into another state. The importance of ritual rites cannot be over stressed as they provide clear sign posts for the character’s role in society as well as our own position in this world (graduations, weddings, etc.)
 * The Ritual**

This describes a descent in action from a higher to a lower state of being, an experience which might involve defilement, moral imperfection, and/or loss of innocence and bliss. This fall is often accompanied by expulsion from a kind of paradise as penalty for disobedience and/or moral transgression.
 * The Fall**

The most common of all situational archetypes, this motif grows out of the parallel between the cycle of nature and the cycle of life. It refers to those situations in which someone or something dies (literally or metaphorically), yet is accompanied by some sign of birth or rebirth. Morning and springtime represent birth, youth, or rebirth; evening and winter suggest old age or death.
 * Death and Rebirth**

Expressed in its simplest form, this refers to situations that suggest nature is good while science and technology are bad.
 * Nature vs. Mechanistic World**

These situations pit obvious forces of good and evil against one another. Mankind shows eternal optimism in the continual portrayal of good triumphing over evil despite great odds.
 * Battle between Good and Evil**

This tension often results from separation during childhood or from an external source when the individuals meet as men and where the mentor often has a higher place in the affections of the hero than the natural parent. Sometimes the conflict is resolved in an atonement.
 * Father-Son Conflict**

This wound is either physical or psychological and cannot be fully healed. It also indicates a loss of innocence or purity. The wound’s pain often drives the sufferer to desperate measures of madness.
 * The Unhealable Wound**

This refers to a skilled individual hero’s ability to use a piece of technology in order to combat evil, continue a journey, or to prove his/her identity as a chosen individual. This symbolizes the extraordinary quality of the hero because no one else can wield the weapon or use it to its full potential. It is usually given by a mentor figure.
 * The Magic Weapon**

The gods intervene on the side of the hero/heroine, or sometimes against him/her.
 * Supernatural Intervention**