Fun with Archetypes: or Un(b)lock Your Destiny

Prostitute

I've been intrigued by archetypes since joining a Jungian dream group in 2007. Jung identified archetypes as individual forces in our personalities and souls that help shape our personal destiny. (I'm simplifying here for the sake of brevity.)

Then a little over a decade ago, famous medical intuitive and author, Caroline Myss created her own program to help individuals identify their archetypes and gain more clarity and insight into their 'divine potential'. She distilled this into the book, Sacred Contracts, which sat on my shelf collecting dust until about a month ago, when I was suddenly drawn to it during my yearly review and preparation for New Year's visioning:

Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential

Turns out Ms. Myss has archived a giant library online of all her archetypal research and you can go to town sussing out what primary archetypes are elbowing each other for room in your soul.

The Sacred Contracts Library

She believes that "each of us is guided by a Sacred Contract that our soul made before we were born." The Contract holds other agreements regarding what lessons we're supposed to learn in life, who from, when and where.

Crazy stuff, huh? There are literally hundreds of these archetypes, which fall into categories like Artist, Leader, Mystic, Caretaker, etc. (Trade secrets: we use these in advertising and screenwriting to define brand personality or make characters distinct from other characters.) If you're a Downton Abbey fan, you might get a kick out of this breakdown of a few of the characters into archetypes:
Downton Abbey Archetypes

Recently, Caroline Myss got hip to the contemporary evolution of archetypes and wrote a new book bringing the whole thing into this millenium, Archetypes: who are you?

This one looks like a whole lot more fun. I mean wouldn't you rather be a "Fashionista" than a "Prostitute"? And while researching archetypes, I stumbled on a new beta social media site which turns out to be driven by this new work: ArchetypeMe.com
Their tagline: Discover the real you.

I gotta tell you, this baby will suck you in, first with the quiz that helps you figure out your primary archetypes (mine were Creative (32%), Spiritual (26%) and Visionary (22%); pretty right on). And then second, you can create your own archetypal dream board of current examples of music, fashion, pop culture, political, architectural, design and other elements that you can pull images from and 'type'. Not that you have that much time to spare, but you can at least take the quiz which is quite enlightening.

What's the point? To be on purpose and on course, of course. Figure out your destiny – and your allies and your enemies on the way to getting there. After all, you wouldn't want to miss your boat or any lessons you're meant to learn – or you might have to come back for a do-over.