In life, we often have the feeling we are observing repetitive patterns, be they behavioral models or natural forms. These models are defined as archetypes, and in analytical psychology, they are considered responsible for why the world is made the way it is and why man thinks the way he does. The famous Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who devoted his entire life to the study of these “molds”, came to the conclusion that archetypes are the archaic forms of an innate human knowledge. We pass them on in a hereditary, almost biological way. A true ancestral psychic heritage.

Jung was much criticized because he was the first to create an interdisciplinary correlation between those branches of knowledge that “should” remain separate. On the one hand, sciences (such as psychology and psychiatry) on the other hand, pseudosciences (such as alchemy, astrology, numerology, and esotericism). The “Great Old Man” (as many call him) Jung, sewed all this knowledge together, using the golden thread, the Ariadne's thread, which helps us not to get lost in the labyrinths of the mind. Doing so, unifying all these disciplines, he managed to generate the comprehensive theory of Universal archetypes and collective subconscious.

His contribution was so important that it ended up changing the perception that man had always had towards some disciplines, such as astrology, which went from being a tool to predict the future to a tool to read the present. This revolution, again thanks to C.G. Jung also ended up changing the way Tarot is read today. Some of the tools Jung used to develop the study of the unconscious were: esoteric astrology and tarot cards. He established a transitory relationship between the individual psyche and a presumed transpersonal symbolic system: the archetypes. From this fusion derives, as a logical consequence, a “mysticization” of psychology and a psychologization of mysticism. This revolution blurred the boundary between the orthodox sciences and the unknown suburbs of knowledge that today we call pseudosciences. The archetypes of the Father, the Mother, the Young Man, the Old Man, the Hero… They are all personalities that belong to the collective psyche, since they are in our mythical and mystical narratives.  Same thing with the archetypal situations, such as Death, Birth, the Journey, the Initiation… These episodes, composed of typical characters and situations, are the episodes of human experience.

In the words of Jung, “a primordial image or archetype is a figure, be it a deity, a human being, or a process, that is constantly repeated throughout history, appearing wherever the creative imagination finds a place to express itself freely. In each of these characters lies a part of human destiny.”

Although the archetypes live in our daily lives, buried under a cloak of rational awareness, they can, through some practices, be recognized and reactivated, to allow us to find and express our true "I". But why we should do it? It's very simple: to build better relationships, to better understand our needs, develop self-awareness and improve as people. In short, to be happy.

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Jung, unlike Freud, did not believe that human beings were born empty and then sculpted their psyche exclusively on the basis of experience accumulated over the course of life. Jung believed that every individual is born with a pre-installed symbolic inheritance, inherited just like we inherit our genes. He also thought that part of this heritage did not belong to society only, or to the individual's family lineage; he thought it was a collective heritage that we could define as “the mental genes of humanity”. These genes, just like the biological genes, regardless of being few, by recombining billions of times, they create the infinite nuances of the human psyche. They generate those characteristics that make my face different from yours, but that also create ethnic groups, lookalikes and identical twins. In this sense, we could consider the Orishas as ethnic groups of archetypal identity.

Therefore, in the archetypal theme of a person, there are multiple coexisting Orishas.  They can be very different, and we can cannot immediately recognize them as ours. The same thing that happen when we ask for a DNA test, and we realize what our true genetic heritage is.

Creating your own archetypal theme would, in a certain sense, be equivalent to doing a mental DNA test and perhaps discovering some ethnical belongings that you would never have suspected. Always remembering that we move in border territories, and this always requires a good dose of caution.

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Archetypes in History

Science, philosophy and religion have been shaped by archetypes. They determine the form we use to decode the external world through the senses, but at the same time, they are the tool we use to project our internal images out. The Mona Lisa, for example. A mysterious woman, who looks at us and smiles at us, wrapped in the depths of dark earth tones. Stable. Triangular. Protagonist on a natural background that allows us to see rocks and water. This is not just a portrait. It is the archetypal evocation of the Great Mother. Of nature itself.

Beethoven's fifth symphony. The musical movement that is so universally famous and that, at the beginning, repeats itself three times before starting the evolution of the theme. Isn't it a universally shared rhythmic archetype that makes us start after three? One, two, three, go! Or the opposite.

Michelangelo's David. A gorgeous young, huge man looking to the left. Isn't the left, (giving our back to the hypothetical line of time) the place where the future resides? It is no coincidence that this statue has become the symbol of a historical period that aimed to abandon a dark past to reborn into a new future: the Renaissance.

Every work filled with universal archetypes is destined to strike us deeply. It resonates with what we already have inside. This encounter is normally expressed with a single simple phrase: “I like it”.

Whoever, in life, will best interpret his own archetype, or who will be able to create archetypal works, will be destined to rise from the crowd. He will be recognizable and therefore recognized. The marriage with our true self is the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

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Conclusion

Jung believed that archetypes represent personalities and basic life circumstances. The Orishas tarot focuses primarily on personalities. Yemayá, Obbatalá, Oshumaré and the others, are images of archetypal prototypes, whose purpose is to help the “player” to identify himself in order to promote a better knowledge of oneself and of others, with all the advantages that this implies.

Understanding that our boss is a Shangó shadow, our mother is an Oyá light, and the person we have entrusted the care of our mind is an Obbatalá shadow, can help us to predict future problems, or to understand the reasons for certain behaviors that seem unusual to us. Understanding which is our dominant Orisha and which other Orishas populate our psyche activates a process of identification, that will make it easier to understand what we want in life. And then, after our personal identification, we can complete the process with psychomagic ritual actions, that will provide an “extra” help on the path to self-realization. ​

Even if a person is permeated by multiple archetypes, Jung noted that one tends to be predominant.

That will be our main Orisha, the one to whom we will dedicate a permanent altar. ​