Archetype
What bothers me, Beth, is the lack of objectivity and, as you say, accuracy that's been introduced into the discussion. Consider that someone reading this thread so far will already be fed up with the subject as a result of inaccurate and unnecessary personal jibes.
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Without the discipline of objectivity we famously see in a mirror that which we are ourselves. One of the many boons of the practice of proper haiku is that this all too human problem is addressed. To do haiku correctly we needs must detach from our inner machinery and its culturally calibrated cuckoo clock. As we deepen into this part-remembered, part-learned skill, we begin to notice how personality and its biased program intrudes upon the liberation of directly experiencing a living moment. Ripples on a pond distort the view. At any instant's door (picture a Nippon Tora, if you will, a gate of forever becoming) we can, so to say, stand amazed upon eternity's shoreline, its seaside, and, perhaps with bucket and spade, view things and their birthing in a much more realistic and objective manner.
This is similar (if not identical) with the way an *archetypal motif* is generated from the (always ineffable) *archetypal source*. That is to say, an archetype is profoundly invisible and only reveals its presence as an archetypal effect under the catalyst of a particular local circumstance. In this respect we are with the subatomic physicists and other alchemists, are we not?
The classic example which springs to mind to illustrate this all too common conceptual error is that of a salt crystal, which, as a declared Jungian, you may have come across in your studies.
It goes something like this: All we can ever know about the archetypal source which produces a crystal's underlying template is what can be deduced from a crystal's formal appearance, here in the phenomenal world. The archetype, in and of itself, is simply numinous and, in infinite recession (like any other event horizon - always gone elsewhere when we get where we thought it was).
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This would be my first point, if we're going to talk about this interesting subject sensibly. The basic definition of the idea is a manifest conceptual duality. (Incidentally, the first conclusion we may draw from all this is that archetypal images are mutable.)
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