--- The archetypal are fundamental laws which interact with our collective consciousness (zeitgeist.) This contrasts with a complex, which are formed in the personal unconscious. > "...archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions" > Jung, The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious. Archetypes are the subjective characterizations based on a bayesian updating of our collect consciousness, both through the stories we tell, and those which die off due to falsehood, or rather misalignment with a more contextually dominant law. Jung himself noted that archetypes are not inherited images but inherited possibilities of representation — predispositions of the psyche to organize experience in certain ways. This is the _transhistorical_ nature of archetypes, despite clothed in culturally contingent symbols. - Archetypes are recurrent structures — “priors” in a universal sense. - Stories (myths, religions, cultural narratives) are **data points** that reinforce or test these priors. - Over time, archetypal expressions that no longer “fit” the dominant context fade or are reinterpreted — like obsolete models. - The collective consciousness (zeitgeist) thus “updates” how archetypes manifest, even though the underlying law remains. *With greater NLP analysis we can statistically prove [[The Nature of Representation, Symbolism & Meaning|ideas is this light]] as well.*