This work attempts to isolate, in as much as it can, the archetype of rebirth—of what this precious force is, and how to better recognize and apply it to the benefit of soul. The inquiry was inspired by the base orphan archetype that we all carry alongside five others. According to Carol Pearson (2015), “resilience” is the chief positive attribute that accompanies this particular archetype.
This makes good sense, but even more so after researching the etymology of resilience: to “re-leap.” The re-component is a given and appears in other archetypes relevant to this inquiry like rebirth, renewal and resurrection. But the leap-component intrigues. What is it, in the leaping, that makes it relevant? Over a century ago, philosopher Henri Bergson coined the term elan vital [“leap of vitality”] to reference the mysterious force that drives life. And it is the “vital” [Lat. “pertaining to “life”] that calls. It is fitting that this French term has since become a common expression in English and other languages—especially, since Bergson (like Pearson) also landed on leap, as it were.
Intuitively, we associate rebirth/leap/elan with up. Consider, for example, the rebirth of the day with a rising sun or the season of spring when the flora (and fauna) re-leap with tremendous vigor from the long (opposite of “vital” and “life”) death-like sleep of winter. Furthermore, upon rebirth, everything gets to work right away on ensuring the subsequent rebirth of their specific collective: procreating, building nests, pushing out buds and flowers. How telling it is that everything steps into
emphatically immediate service to the very context that has sprung them!
In transpersonal terms, these instances demonstrate the more comprehensive death-rebirth archetype, the rising up from the psychological chthonic-within which is best rendered in myths that address travels to and (especially) from the underworld. Here, we will look at three such versions: the myths of Osiris and Aker (from the ancient Egyptian), the myth of Psyche (from the Greco-Roman), and the myth of Odin (from the Norse).
The Myth of Osiris
The notion of rebirth is more complicated in ancient Egyptian myth than in others because Osiris, himself, remains in the underworld after being murdered by his brother Seth. In (very) brief, by so remaining, Osiris serves as a mysterious force that aids both the sun (Ra or Re on his nightly underworld journey) as well as the deceased human.
However, it is precisely this element of remaining, forever, in the underworld that we (in the land of the living) are given some sort of tangible connection, albeit very distant, to an environment that is otherwise utterly beyond our reach. Hence, after the tandem-journey, the sun rises into life symbolized by Khepri (fittingly, a dung beetle), the deceased human or pharaoh continues on to take their eternal place among the
“imperishable” (north) stars or inhabit the living world as ba souls (symbolized by birds with human heads), and even an aspect of Osiris himself is reborn in the form of his son Horus under the falcon-symbol.
Hence, Osiris very much resembles the “savior” of the Christian tradition by serving as a
necessary agent to soulful resurrection. In the words of seminal egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark, “Osiris is the most vivid achievement of the Egyptian imagination…[He] is immanent…He is both dead and the source of all living. Hence to become Osiris is to become one with the cosmic cycles of death and rebirth” (97).
With this in mind, let’s return to the quest of locating the incipience of the renewal-side of death. Foremost, to the ancient Egyptians, the corpse of the deceased was the seed, so to speak, of rebirth. Depth psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz writes that in ancient Egypt “resurrection…is not a simple matter of restoring the dead body to life, but a complete [and subtler] reconstruction of it, which, however, had the old body as its point of departure” (17).
When Seth murders Osiris by trapping him in a “chest” or “box” or “coffin” (depending on
the version) which he then covers with molten lead and casts into the Nile, the entirety of the Osiris archetype is narratively rendered. For here, we have the corpse (as the point of departure containing the forementioned elan vital or leap into life) encapsulated in mediums that symbolize the underworld and the unconscious (water of the Nile and the lead of alchemy and astrology) just as we have Osiris as dead-yet-living in the underworld. Or, to employ a different metaphor, we have the code or blue-print for rebirth encapsulated in the seed which must die (putrefy and dissolve into the earth) to
push “up” the new flora.
The Myth of Aker
We are still far from isolating this elan vital through metaphors like blueprint and code. They are too abstract, which places them too close to (if not the actual) mystery itself. However, we can look to the dynamics of encapsule-ment, through the source domains of the chest/coffin/Nile-water/seed as representations of the embodiment we experience as living beings and as being rather mysteries to ourselves. To this point, von Franz correlates the Egyptian to underworld to that of the
Greeks through a most intriguing Egyptian deity: Aker. The image of Aker comprises a double-headed, recumbent, sphinx-like lion with one head facing east and the other west (the directions of rebirth and death, respectively). More importantly he is an “earth” (i.e., matter/substance) god. This earth god is referred to also as “yesterday” and “tomorrow” which adds the element of time, or in underworld terms, timelessness, to the list. He is said to guard the secret of rebirth, which makes sense as its iconography suggests a liminal place between or transcending the opposites.
After extensive research into the myths of the Greek underworld and the etymology of the following specific figures, von Franz (1998) concludes the that the Aker-archetype exists within the Greek Acheron—the river that serves as the entrance to the underworld, and as a word for the Greek underworld, itself (p. 16). And I might suggest potentially including Charon [pronounced ‘karon’] the figure who ferries souls across the river Styx and (in the Roman versions, the river Acheron). So Aker, himself, is a threshold guardian to the underworld—a means of entering OR exiting it. And his unique image encapsulates these archetypes, like a box or coffin or seed, perhaps holding somewhat of the rebirth mystery that this inquiry attempts to approach.
The Myth of Psyche
Let’s lighten the direction and turn to the Greeks and Romans to consider the myth of
Psyche. The only extant written account we seem to have on her tale comes to us from the second-century Roman author Apuleius (who studied in Athens, Greece and spent a good deal of his life in North Africa, including time in Alexandria, Egypt—so we can assume he had at least a fair degree of knowledge regarding the mythologies of Egypt, Greece, and Rome).
I will jump straight to the final of the four tasks that Psyche must complete to be reunited
with her love, Eros. In (again, very) brief, Psyche travels to the underworld through means other than literal death (reminiscent of Osiris in the underworld as both dead and living) where, as per Aphrodite’s instructions, she must retrieve some “beauty” (often interpreted as a beauty-cream) from Persephone (Queen of the underworld).
It is fitting that Aphrodite, the archetype of love, provides the “box” to hold the beauty cream because as we will see, a means of “embodiment” (whether through lead or earth or a chest or coffin) is necessary to hold those things charged with the mysteries of the underworld and its secret of rebirth. Furthermore, it is intriguing that E. J. Kennedy’s (1998) translation of the Latin for the Penguin Classics edition reads thusly: “Take this
casket (giving it to her) and be off with you to the Underworld to the ghostly abode of Orcus himself” [italics mine] (p. 101).
Fortunately, Persephone obliges Psyche. However, she “…secretly filled the box, shut it and returned it to her” [italics mine] (Graves, 2009, pp. 139-140). I emphasize “secret” because there is something about the separation from knowing that saturates this entire inquiry and, indeed, the inquiry into the mystery of rebirth, itself. In fact, I suspect that the very elements of secrecy and mystery are necessities to the functioning of the rebirth dynamic (but I digress).
Psyche is specifically instructed to NOT look in the box, but of course she does and finds that it is empty (cf. the secret/mystery). And then, “Out crept a truly Stygian sleep which seized her, and wrapped her in a dense cloud of drowsiness. She fell prostrate and lay there like a corpse”(Graves, p. 140). I find it interesting, that “corpse” finds its way into the language, as well as “Stygian” (albeit not “Acheron” per se. However, conflations and overlappings among myths are more the rule than the exception). Regardless, it all works out; and another rare “happy ending” in myth ensues when she is reunited in love and with her love, Eros.
One final point on the relevance of this myth to the present thesis is that the beauty cream is an agent of renewal. It is retrieved from the underworld. And, it is of such nature that it is apparently equally deadly as it is renewing.
The Myth of Odin
I conclude with a brief foray into the “Runatal” a Norse myth about Odin’s self-immolation
on the world-tree Yggdrasil which culminated in a strange kind of rebirth. In this tale, and rendered
in the voice of Odin, himself: “I hung on a wind-rocked tree nine whole nights” and “downward I
peered, to runes applied myself, wailing learnt them, then fell down thence” (Thorpe, 2004, p. 80). It
seems that to the Norse mythic imagination, the “secret-and-the-box” is simply the knowledge of, or
encounter with, the runes.
The underworld correlation is obvious, through the hanging and through the downward-
peering. But the learning of the runes is another matter. My intention here, is to apply them as a
context that perhaps more clearly (or familiarly) addresses the relationship between the “secret” and
the “box” because the form or embodiment or encapsulation of the runes is writing—that is, actual
visible markings on stone, wood or page. Their “secret” aspect is their meaning. And here, I do not mean the literal denotations that are ascribed to them, but rather what it is that they precipitate
magically, mysteriously, via their very physical presence. Not unlike the corpse as the point-of-
departure for the rebirth as rendered by Osiris in the box, the corpse of the runes is their physical
text.
The point being, I simply wish to apply this myth analogously to the place where death and
life comingle, via the relationship of concrete and abstract that we encounter in writing (and
reading). And “concrete” can mean either the markings themselves or even betters, as a deeper layer
in: that aspect of the abstract that we call “concrete”—namely, imagery. As in, the words “red barn
on a hill” render an unmistakable so-called concrete image in the imagination. However, I suspect
there is a deeper level that I’ll not find here, though in failing to reach the conclusion, may have been
able to get nearer to it.
Conclusions
Finally, I believe that in all this work of separating and making distinctions between death
and rebirth, underworld and the land of the living, mystery and corpse, secret and box, that there is
an inescapable unity to them that cannot be separated: A wholeness. It seems that the business of
separating summons wholeness as a catalyst and maybe as an effect as well. In these examples, I am
considering “love” as a potential candidate.
In the myth of Osiris, we have the love of his wife Isis, who sees to securing his resurrection-
value (although I did not cover that part). In the myth of Psyche, it is her love for Eros (not to
mention the archetypal love that Aprhodite embodies, albeit grumpily in this particular myth). As for
Odin’s myth, I am and stumped (to use a bad tree-metaphor) and hung out to dry (to use another)
on how this might correlate with love. But perhaps it relates to his desire for this mysterious
“knowledge of the runes.” After all, desire plays a prominent role in love, and is the force that causes
the Vedic “maya” to become one’s “box.” And let’s not forget, that after Psyche is happily reunited
with Eros, they have a daughter. Her name is Voluptas (i.e., desire), which may be a fitting that
“leap” to end this inquiry on.
References
Anonymous. (2004). The poetic edda. (B. Thorpe, Trans.). Northvegr Foundation Press. (Original work
published ca. 900-1000 AD)
Apuleius. (1998). The golden ass, or, Metamorphoses (E. J. Kenney, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original
work published ca. 160-180 AD)
Apuleius (2009). The transformation of Lucius, otherwise known as the Golden Ass. (R. Graves, Trans.).
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (Original work published ca. 160-180 AD)
Clark, R. T. R. (1958). Myth and symbol in ancient Egypt. Thames and Hudson.
Pearson, C. S. (2015). The hero within: Six archetypes we live by. Turtleback Books.
von Franz, M. L. (1998). On dreams and death: A Jungian interpretation. Open Court.
