Integrative Archetypes (Part Two)
This is the second in a series on Integrative Archetypes. You can find the first four and the framing for the project in Part One.
5. The Neo Shamanic
These prime receptacles for the creative advance of novelty perpetually instigate encounters between the ancestral and the emergent. They hold open the turnstiles between deep time and the bewildering now, refusing to let either side forget the other exists.
Neither priest, therapist, guru nor entertainer yet often leaning into all four simultaneously. They occupy a functional role so archaic that the modern world has long forgotten its name.
Crafting moments that reconnect us to dream, to vision, to subtlety and to religion without creating caustic cults or becoming overly drunk on their own imaginal potency. They routinely call us to God by every name.
Well versed in a plethora of mystical traditions these ‘culturally androgynous’ (Bard’s term) agent provocateurs are often found in the estuaries of our collective subconscious. They thrive in the brackish inbetweens where the storied rivers of our wisdom traditions merge with the hyperreal seas of our technological now.
They are fountains of synchronicity at the crossroads of causation, specializing in the transmission of subtle energy whilst more often than not keeping one foot (or at least a wily toe) firmly moored on the banks of reason, science and rationality.
With the greatest of reverence for our esoteric cultural inheritance they don’t shy away from adapting and evolving dharmic source materials to better support and nourish us in this time between worlds.
Savvy to the leading edge of the post-political, sub-cultural and metacognitive they have a grip on big history and track the broadest of memetic waves that ripple through our human story. Their gift is not merely the transmission of a tradition but the re-seeding of wonder itself. A kind of cultural re-wilding of the imagination that is committed to quietly reversing the slow domestication of the human soul.
Comfortable in a plethora of altered states be they Dionysian, medicinal or contemplative, they are skilled in holding their unique energetic frequency whilst remaining meaningfully engaged with the surrounding world.
As the mainstream loses touch with initiatory practices they create new rituals to meet the moment, presiding over our rites of passage and remaining steadfast witnesses to our moments of metamorphosis.
They are the connective tissue that mediate within and between different cultural collectives. They welcome all to the fire, shapeshifting across a range of fluid identities and bridging between all kinds of wonderful weirdos. They have a deep acceptance and lived compassion for our peculiarly 21st Century set of neuroses.
Initiated through immense suffering they are left possessed ‘by something terrible and beautiful’1 as they walk forth alone into the shrouded darkness of the post cultural unknown in search of new songs and stories to bring back to the tribes.
They are planetary beings2 who’ve consented to be of service to a story much larger than themselves. Having undergone the comprehensive transition from a narrow cultural identity towards a genuinely planetary self-conception they have apprenticed themselves to mastering the kinds of practice and encounters that help to facilitate this shift in others too.
Their deepest living questions are how to re-enchant the world and reveal the numinous in the contemporary. How to stay in genuine contact with the sacred, uncanny and wyrd in a cultural moment characterised by hyperstimulation, deadened ironic detachment and thickly nihilist armour.
Possessed of an almost embarrassing sensitivity to the energetic weather of a room they read the unspoken atmospherics of a gathering the way a seasoned sailor reads sky.
They strive to live in accordance with the subtle energetics of their present ecology, maintaining an intimate awareness of the songs, seasons, loving whispers and death cries of their surrounds.
Whilst recognising their role requires the pushing of certain boundaries they oppose the unskillful use of power in sacred contexts and request accountability for the impact of their ministrations. They are cognisant of the many before them who have unintentionally slipped into grey and dark magic and so seek to form new reservoirs of trust in preparation for the generations of shamanoids3 that will follow them.
Wielders of the word hypnotic they sing new songs on the periphery of the village, trickling sacred sonnets into the ears of passers by. With a dancer’s timing and a poet’s weight they choose when to speak the unspeakable and when to let the silence ring.
6. The Regenerative Decentralist
They’ve felt the thing. The DAO as living organism. They’ve submerged themselves in liquid democracy and witnessed the inevitable surge of a truly aligned collective intelligence moving at speed and scale.
Spawning the mycelial in the digital they recognise the almost limitless potential of such sustained swarms of transformational activity. In such moments these online hives feel less like an organisation and more like a temporary telepathic organ.
And yet they remain acutely aware that decentralisation itself is not inherently virtuous. Always cognisant that without ethical culture infusing such systems they will simply distribute pathology more efficiently.
Be it Solar, Cypher, Luna or Myco they’ve dived deep into the mosh pit of every kind of punk and kept the best from each. Tracing the development of these fertile pockets of regenerative resistance they sing new power ballads of liberation in the face of dehumanising hyper capitalism.
Never reducing themselves to a singular aesthetic or political position they speak truth to power wherever they see it, in themselves, in their closest collaborators and to any liberatory movements that may have lost their way.
They rebuild the plumbing of the world through cooperatives, mutual credit, open-source protocols, community land trusts and peer-to-peer infrastructure, all in the knowledge that the shape of our economics is the shape of our potential souls. They steward what cannot be owned, govern what must be shared and remember that abundance was never scarce it was simply ring fenced a long time ago.
They’re asynchronous anarchists highly attuned to the power on the fringes and attempting that most delicate of moves, decentralisation without disintegration. Always asking how we can claim more freedom for our selves and our platforms without dissolving into a disshevelled state of cyber psychotic chaos.
They’re denizens of still gestating network states well aware that their mesh works of human capacity are to late stage capitalism what monasteries were to the collapse of Rome, precious protocol communities that preserve what is good, true and beautiful through the long and tempestuous death throws of extractive industrial modernity.
Advanced practitioners in the unbundling of the state they pick apart the conflated functions of our sprawling administrations and ask what (if anything) genuinely requires centralised coordination. They fight for quiet victories that protect our privacy, crafting uncensorable networks that escape the bounds of big brother and big media entirely.
They firmly suspect the twentieth century mistook scale for civilisation and so push every decision to the smallest unit within which it can wisely be held. They stand in opposition to the hyper scaling platform metastases that has gradually devoured almost the entirety of our digital commons.
Closely tracking the movements of techno authoritarianism they advocate for a different kind of accelerationism. A hastening which propels us safely through the heart of the singularity with every human carefully considered and poised to benefit from the prosperity a newly automated paradigm that no longer pulses to the beat of slave labour and poisonous externalities.
They are high tech and high touch, refusing the Silicon Valley split between machine and meaning they sense their lives ‘are part of a larger circle than our lifespans.’ (Ferananda).
More than touching grass they routinely and ritualistically ensconce themselves in the earth. Knowing that to lose touch with their ecology is to cease to be a negentropic force for change.
Gently guiding their murmuration as best they can they act as heart based bridges between countless computer meditated communities. They are the very human links in an increasingly cybernetic chain of intelligence.
They sit with the tension between hard, living and complementary currencies without prematurely picking a side, instead desiring a basket of options that can reground value in actual planetary flows. They recognise the internet ceased being merely media and became territory somewhere around the invention of truly decentralised money.
For them open source is an ethos, not just a licence. They see the commons as the most critical substrate of a prospering fourth generational mode D civilisation’4 and are deeply imbued with the conviction that intelligence always wants to be shared. They know at their core that the enclosure of code is the enclosure of the mind.
7. The Heterodox Theory Artist
Passionate theory artists for whom the gestation, testing and deployment of ideas is a deeply moral imperative. Highly allergic to the premature resolution of ambiguity these devotees of the long form dialectic will fearlessly follow the thread wherever it leads.
They’ve swallowed every kind of pill and yet rather than choke out on a rainbow of conflicting sentiment they somehow emerge neither broken by despair nor captured by reaction. Instead they are left processing the kinds of contradictions the rest of the culture struggles to metabolise.
Thermally energised by encounters with ideologues of all persuasions they find themselves in perpetual opposition to those who mistake certainty for wisdom. Deeply difficult to place on any conventional political spectrum they remain willing to ardently defend the virtues of western civilisation whilst simultaneously offering up its most blistering critique.
Treating art-making as a metaphysical act and theory-construction as a kind of performance. They refuse the sterile divide between gallery and salon, cabaret and symposium. They transmute their diagnosis into music, poetry, performance and softly spoken late night discourse that can alter the trajectory of an entire life.
They remain suspicious of the Apollonian tidiness of bloodless techno optimism and wary of the kind of over managed and safety obsessed society that gradually subsumes everything that makes human existence electric. Ever vigilant to the mission creep of our sprawling institutions they employ a high calibre cynicism to ward off the complete colonisation of life by such administrative logic.
Embracing the sexual and beatific as engines of culture they find potency in the dance of desire and subsist on a steady diet of Eros and élan vital. Willing to be seduced by grand ideas they read the Western canon as a chthonic, libidinal and dangerous inheritance rather than as a dated eccentricity or simple litany of colonial crimes.
In awe of, yet unafraid of the sacred they steadfastly hold to a decentralised religiousness that is far from physicalist yet innately resistant to the siren song of a narcissistic spiritual materialism.
They sagely side step the heady intoxication of heterodoxy for its own sake, having woken up from that particular hangover countless times before, sometimes naked, sometimes feathered and always a little less true. They remain countercultural with just a dash of adolescence, religious with a tiny twist of the doctrinaire and wholly erotic with only the most generative overtones of the transgressive.
Deeply dubious of the pathologies of our pathologists they point to the territory that was once the domain of philosophy, religion and art that is now colonised by a mechanistic neo-psychology. A cultural force which despite its best intentions can serve only to flatten our genuine spiritual struggle in its ever burgeoning DSM.
Fiercely maintaining that the deepest truths are grasped through sympathetic immersion rather than dispassionate dissection. They advocate for a deliberate descent into the mythic and embodied registers where the heady ethers of our optimisation culture have all but evaporated. They are all too aware that a series of frozen frames is never tantamount to movement itself.
8. The Earth Mother Resurgent
She’s ancient rootstock sent up green again through the brittle concrete of late modernity. A pluralistic nature conduit that is the return of a knowing we nearly managed to ridicule right out of existence.
She enters the room and the room remembers it has a body. Unafraid to offer up her presence in the face of endless pontificating she slows the discourse until breath can rejoin brilliance.
She’s metabolised second and third wave feminism, the indigenous revival, the somatic turn and the ecological awakening. She is the synthesis. She doesn’t need to fight the masculine because she has nothing to prove. She doesn’t need to reject modernity because she’s already taken what works.
With an innate PhD in the merits of partnership over domination she knows with every fibre of her being that healthy systems emerge when differences are integrated rather than suppressed through unceasing competition. She sees clearly that our next societal evolution will be catalysed by the simple recognition that ‘I see you. And you matter to me.’5
Traversing meadow, boardroom, kitchen and deathbed she brings womb, ancestor, child and future into one breathing field and reminds us that nothing living is separate here. Initiated into the metaphorical (and often literal) practices of birthing new life, culture and meaning she gives of herself so that our human story can find renewal and continuity.
Hers is a fierce love that includes and enlivens the masculine, oscillating between patient grace and uncompromising truth she offers up neither naive forgiveness nor endless punishment. Refusing the shadow of the patriarchal register without rejecting men her eyes remain aware and yet her arms still capable of loving embrace.
Her often heroic metabolism of ancestral grief has shown her that generations of feminine wounding can calcify into weaponised resentment or be gradually alchemised into a steady and loving resolve that is perhaps her greatest gift to all the women yet to be born. Such hard won wisdom fuels and flavours her renewed participation in the dance of life. Sometimes this transmutation is more than she can bare on her own. And she can hold that in herself and others too.
Her mind hums with multimodal insight and she shares the fullness of her intellectual abundance but never wholly collapses it into a system or schema lesser than life and nature itself. Refraining from compressing her deepest wisdom into a single model as she’s all too aware what will be lost in translation.
Receptive yet sovereign she is open to everything and captured by nothing. She’s paid a high cost for being herself in this culture, endured the loneliness of heeding an inner voice she was trained to distrust and borne the energetic expense of staying soft in hard rooms. She remains frequently misread by the masculine coded establishment as well as by strains of feminism that struggle to hold all sides of her at once. And yet she continues.
Her gift is the restoration of integrity, of unarmoured love with roots, of softness with teeth and of ceremony with consequence. She emanates the felt sense that when given half a chance life will always produce more than it consumes.
Joe Lightfoot is a writer, coach and podcaster. He publishes articles at his blog, published a book in 2020 called a A Collective Blooming: The Rise Of The Mutual Aid Community and is the host of The Lightfoot Podcast.
I'm honored to have my ideas included in your work, Joe. It's no small task to weave so many diverse perspectives into something coherent and meaningful. Thank you, my friend.
Interested in the wisest of these archetypes (across the entire series) actively expressed in real world humans, scribed by secret scout.
If you know such a scroll, please send.