Jung, Buddhism, and the Origin of Archetypes

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. Now, Yama, Indian culture’s mythological first self-sacrificing monarch, is derived (culturally, linguistically and theologically) from Aryaman, who gave his name to Iran. Ireland’s first high king and universal monarch of the Indo-European era Érimón and first self-sacrificer Donn are also aspects of the same underlying Indo-European archetype as Yama in Vedic and Tibetan Buddhist culture. And what I noticed in Jung’s work, which he takes it, 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 metaphors in Disinfolklore are ‘trolls’ and ‘trolling’ as fundamental to the units of information/memes which concern us. That’s another term I use, units of information or meme. So those three for me are synonymous. And I use them interchangeably.

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 and 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 language one, whose native tongue, is an Indo-European language. So that’s the only claim I’m making.

Source: The Volya Radio Interview: Archetypes

The intellectual genealogy of ‘archetype’ in the Disinfolklore method. Not Jung’s universalism — the author traces archetypes through Tibetan Buddhism’s Yama (Lord of Death), through Augustine, to Jung. The critical correction: Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ examples all come from Indo-European traditions. Disinfolklore’s claim is precisely scoped: archetypes that work on Indo-European structured minds. This distinction separates the method from the universalism that invited Jung’s critics.

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