I suggest that decades of Hollywood movies, network TV drama's and media promoted imagery of the Black President Archetype have paved the way for the election of Barack Obama, and that Barack Obama has consciously employed this archetype for his own political promotion - and thereby created an actual archetypal social reality which has the potential to fully create the 'shadow' side of that archetype.
We can suggest an possible archetypal analysis of the significance of the Black President Archetype via its previous and existing cultural forms in the media.
The imagery of a Black President of the United States has been a staple of Hollywood movies for decades. Usually the Black President is seen as a saviour figure.
What is interesting is the context in which those cultural forms of the Black president within movies have been actualised, and they have almost always been associated with some of national disaster or planetary disaster. It appears that the archetypal image of the Black president of the United States is always accompanied by imagery associated with an apocalypse.
This is the shadow side of the archetype.
One cannot have one without the other.
From the film Deep Impact with Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck, Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer in 24, Chris Rock, Tommy Lister and James Earl Jones as Douglas Dillman in 'The Man' (1972), the image of the Black President is associated with war and crisis. In most cases the the media archetype of the Black President saves the nation and the world.
The Black President archetype is usually peddled to the masses as some sort of saviour who can always solve every existential threat to the nation and world.
Therefore in an age of chaos the archetype of the Black President is what becomes active within the collective unconscious. Problem / Reaction / Solution.
This is interesting as this is what is happening right now in the world.
It appears that the media creation of an archetype may in fact assist that archetype in actualising itself.
By creating a cultural imagery associated with a Black President saving the nation in peril, when the nation is in actual peril then that archetype may find fertile ground within the collective unconscious of a nation - and allow individuals and social forces to use that archetype to gain political power.
What is even more interesting is the suggestion that the election of a Black President may in fact be an manifestation of a prefiguration of some catastrophic event in human history.
I suggest that the Black President Archetype prefigures a global existential crisis of some kind.
In the alchemical process each must face the demon Choronzon, the beast who guards the gates within and who is the personal nemesis of all of us. That includes nations as well as indivduals and alchemists.
It may be that Obama represents the 'saviour' image that Americans associate with Choronzon - the figure who stands at the gates of the coming chaos. Obama is a taislman, a fetish, being used by the collective unconscious in order to somehow avert the coming disaster.
But Obama is not the only archetype that walks this world.
The creation of a myriad archetypal figures and images in the media, and in cultural forms all over the world, have unleashed armies of archetypes upon the planet.
Most of these archetypes will never be actualised as a wider social, but as society changes then these archetypes awaken and spread, colonising the minds of those they infect.
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