The archetypal mind, and the question it does not answer

There is a question in the Ra Contact that has no answer, and a reader who finds it will usually assume the question is badly formed. The questioner asks what the archetypal mind is, how it is structured, what it contains, and how it informs the intuition and conscious mind of a person. It is a well-made question, asked in the right session, on the record. What follows is a refusal.

You must realize that we offered these concepts to you so that you might grow in your own knowledge of the self through the consideration of them. We would prefer, especially for this latter query, to listen to the observations upon this subject which the student of these exercises may make and then suggest further avenues of the refinement of these inquiries. We feel we might be of more aid in this way.

Read what is actually happening. Nothing is refused as dangerous or as improper. The concepts are confirmed as having been offered, and the reason they were offered is stated: so that the student might grow in knowledge of the self through the consideration of them. Then the answer stops being an answer and becomes an invitation — to listen to the observations the student makes, and to suggest where the inquiry should go next.

Figure 01

The question, and the space where the answer was not

This is worth pausing on, because the reflex is to supply a structure from elsewhere. The material’s own account of its symbols is a system, and a reader who knows it will find it easy to reconstruct what Ra declines to give: the twenty-two Major Arcana as the architecture, the sequence as the process, the figures as the stations. That reconstruction is coherent, widely repeated, and not what the passage says. This essay’s position is that the refusal is the most useful thing here, and that a description assembled around it belongs to whoever assembled it.

What the material does say

Three things, and they are more than they first look.

The first is that the archetypes are not the tarot, and the difference is not subtle. Asked where the tarot came from, Ra does not claim it, and does not present it as a translation of something older. The origin is given as twofold, and the two halves are not the same kind of thing.

The origin of this system of study and divination is twofold: firstly, there is that influence which, coming in a distorted fashion from those who were priests attempting to teach the Law of One in Egypt, gave form to the understanding, if you will pardon the misnomer, which they had received. These forms were then made a regular portion of the learn/teachings of an initiate. The second influence is that of those entities in the lands you call Ur, Chaldea, and Mesopotamia who, from old, had received the, shall we say, data for which they called having to do with the heavens. Thusly we find two methods of divination being melded into one with uneven results; the, as you call it, astrology and the form being combined to suggest what you might call the correspondences which are typical of the distortions you may see as attempts to view archetypes.

A priestly attempt to teach, arriving distorted, and an older body of sky-reading from Ur and Chaldea — melded into one system “with uneven results.” The correspondences that make the deck usable as an interpretive tool are the seam where two different methods were joined, and the material calls the result a distortion before it calls it anything else. That is a considerably more specific origin than the one most tarot writing assumes, and it is a second reason the deck cannot be read as an encoding of something fixed.

The same source says what the deck is a product of.

The product of many, many generations of work upon what we conceived to be the archetypical mind produced the tarot which was used by our peoples as a training aid in developing the magical personality.

The deck is the product of the work — many generations of work upon what was conceived to be the archetypal mind. That is a different relationship from the one most tarot writing assumes. The archetypes are the field of inquiry; the tarot is what a society did with it, for a stated purpose, and the doing is dated and cultural rather than being a decoding of something fixed.

The second is that a constructed form is not the same as the thing it is a constructed form of, and this is where the material’s most useful sentence sits. Asked whether the tarot still has value for anyone now, Ra answers with the frame that governs every use of a symbolic system in this material.

It is appropriate to study one form of constructed and organized distortion of the archetypical mind in depth in order to arrive at the position of being able to become and to experience archetypes at will. You have three basic choices. You may choose astrology, the twelve signs, as you call these portions of your planet’s energy web, and what has been called the ten planets. You may choose the tarot with its twenty-two so-called Major Arcana. You may choose the study of the so-called Tree of Life with its ten Sephiroth and the twenty-two relationships between the stations.

A constructed and organized distortion — that is the material’s own word for what a deck of cards is, said by the source that appears to be speaking through the deck. It is not dismissing the thing; the instruction is to study one such form in depth, not as a dilettante but as one who seeks the touchstone. And the purpose is not to know the images. It is “to arrive at the position of being able to become and to experience archetypes at will.” The goal stated here is the capacity, not the information.

The third is the shape of the refusal itself, and this is where the material is most consistent with everything else it says. A system that insists its own maps are distortions, that declines to be assembled from the best parts of several systems, and that repeatedly says discernment has to happen from within rather than being handed over, is not being coy about the archetypes. It is being consistent. The same answer arrives when the tarot is a system assembled across cultures, when the pre-trans fallacy is the reader’s error, and when the question of who chooses the questions is met with a refusal to choose them.

What this community does without a description

Here the essay has to be explicit about the boundary, because everything in this section is ours and none of it is Ra’s.

The material names the archetype mind, declines to describe it, and gives one concrete discipline for approaching it: take one constructed form, go into it properly, and notice what it does to your own capacity. The three passages quoted above do not offer an interpretive method, and they do not say what any individual image means — that is what the material gives in place of both, and this community does not supply either. The reason is not squeamishness. The material is the source of a practice that can be described honestly as: find one map, work it, and watch the archetypes rather than the map. Anything more precise than that is this library’s invention, and an invention presented as the material’s would be the same error in a new place.

The honest room is in the using. What actually happens to a person who works a constructed form in depth? That question is answerable from experience, and this community answers it in sessions rather than in essays, because the answer is particular to the person being asked. The other honest move is the one the material itself demonstrates: if the archetype mind has not been described, then the observations the student makes about it are the primary material, and the student is the one whose observations were being waited for. That is a different stance toward a symbolic system than most of the literature takes, and it is the stance this essay is written to make legible.

The measure of whether a map is being used or worshipped is available without any further doctrine. A map that is being used can be put down. A map that has become an identity cannot be examined by the person holding it, and nothing in the material describes a way to do that.

What this means for the rest of the library

The archetypal system is referred to in several places in this library — the tarot discussion, the discipline of the personality, the pre-trans fallacy — and in each case it arrives as a thing the material has described. The description is thinner than those references imply. The material gives a field of inquiry, three constructed forms to choose between, a discipline for working one, and a goal stated as capacity. The rest — the architecture of the twenty-two, the correspondence between them, the sequence a person is supposed to move through — is inherited from the traditions that built the deck, and this library does not present inherited material as though the Ra Contact had stated it.

That is not a small correction to make to a favourite subject. It is the same correction the material asks of every one of its readers, and the reason it is worth making is the same one the material gives: the concepts were offered so that a student might grow in knowledge of the self through considering them. A description the source declined to give, adopted as though it had been, is the opposite of growth. It hands the student a conclusion in place of the inquiry the concepts were for.

What it would take to know more

Nothing here closes the subject, and it should not read as though it does. The questioner got a refusal in 1981, and the honest position is that the material holds the same position now. What would change this essay is not another summary of the tarot, and not a better reconstruction of the archetype mind from the symbolic traditions. It would be the material describing the structure, if the material chose to. The most any reader can do in the meantime is what the passage itself recommends: notice what one constructed form does, and say so.

A companion essay on the tarot and what a constructed distortion is for sits beside this one, and the practice page sets out the disciplines the material does describe.