Jung, Buddhism, and the Origin of Archetypes

One of the sources for my idea of archetypes comes from Tibetan Buddhism. The entire practice is about embedding archetypes in our minds. 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. What I noticed in Jung’s work, where he talks about archetypes from Tibetan Buddhism, is that he says he took the idea of archetypes from St. Augustine.

So again, it’s the similar idea of trying to embed these tropes in readers’ minds. Buddhist scholars, St. Augustine, Jung himself were trying to surface archetypes in our minds and at the same time embed new archetypes in our minds. I use the term archetype and archetyping in a very evolved manner. I look at how those writers used the idea and interpreted it, but in Disinfolklore the way the Russians or Donald embed archetypes in memes, in news, while similar is quite far removed from such august scholars as Jung, Augustine, Joseph Campbell or the Dalai Lama. 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 - memes, trolls and units of information- for me are synonymous. And I use them interchangeably. Archetyping is also a fundamental unit of analysis in Disinfolklore. Especially when it comes to using AI /artificial neural network algorithms to detect the presence of archetypes in memes.

What we know, but what Carl Jung couldn’t have known, is that what he considered to be universal and part of the collective unconscious of humanity, actually, all the examples he gives are from Indo-European languages and religions. He did not know this then. He didn’t really understand that Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, is an Indo-European religion. Its archetypes are Indo-European. Tibetan Buddhism was transmitted from the Vedic into the Sanskrit, then through the Aryan / Iranian reform of Sakyamuni, eventually it was translated into the Tibetan. It was preserved in Tibetan, but its archetypal content is mainly Indo-European. 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 first language, 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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