Sunday, 1 February 2009

The Black President Archetype.

Future psychological historians, the explorers of the archetypal 'Innerverse', will one day judge the significance of the media constructed 'Black President Archetype' and its impact upon the contemporary collective unconscious, especially in relation to politics and the election of Barack Obama.

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 talisman, 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 reality, but as society changes then these archetypes awaken and spread, colonising the minds of those they infect.

5 comments:

  1. YouTube - JMP Philip J. Berg Obama Lawsuit 2008
    http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=PSqGePdZ0fU&feature=related

    The biggest question was why, if a Hawaii birth certificate exists as his campaign has stated, Obama hasn't simply ordered it made available to settle the rumors.

    http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=86325



    The Six Black Presidents

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/6492410/The-Six-Black-Presidents

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  2. I think the American electorate are now thinking , what have we done! His inaugauration far from being a second coming was dull and uninspiring according to most commentators.

    It may have seen a good idea at the time but i would now contend that we have an American president who is out of his depth and at the mercy of the American pressure groups. He is going to be a very weak president.

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  3. Obama did win due to a crisis in the economy. Had it been a military crisis, McCain would be president now. I don't think that TV or movies influenced this election.

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  4. The inauguration was, far from uninspiring, the first time in my life that I was inspired by a civic spokesman. I had been in a CNN/Facebook chatroom, and though my natural cynicism couldn't be completely hosed off, it being kind of engraved into my Ism, I did notice something.

    A man standing "next to me" in the international Farcebook chat room, which scrolled the world's blabberbytes from Blackberries in a river...This man said: I never knew this could still happen, since politicos are corny, dishonest, never the larger-than-life balloons they puff themselves up to be. But this Obama is articulate enough to make me feel like I can go and do things I didn't used to have any confidence in doing. I don't know how he does it, but it's wonderful, and even if his actions disappoint us, and I don't think that is imminent to the extreme, he will have still succeeded in the zeitgeist duty."

    This is the first time in my life a President I helped elect is sitting in the White House. That alone just makes me feel different. It's not a miracle. It is something I want to pick up, and go with it.

    I am not afraid to do things I have not gotten right or did perfectly, before. That's a new way to both think and feel for me.

    There's a list in Choronzon's Grinnoire, our music project's museum of audiovisual and written detritus from the band, and also, from various other artists and musicians, which includes the heretical "inside-out-Thelema" mottos of that entity I am obsessed with...and one of these is of value to me above and beyond all that...

    "Do What Thou Won't Shall Be The Law of the Whole."

    "Love is the Outlaw, Love Over Won't."

    "Prime Directive: Do Not Let The Panic Button Press You. Worrying is no fun, and worrying not only doesn't help make better what's worried over, it ALWAYS worsens it.

    That our minds do this at all represents a bad bug in the "Operating System" of the Human (Out of the Box) and Pre-Post-Human(Mind/Body Hacked by Its User.) The tenacious habit of worry, like bad malware, sticks around and leaves crap that seems to keep perpetuating it.

    Even my qippothically-formed, dubiously grinning, unsettlingly cute and enthralling [Non]Object of Desire shrugs, has no advice on how to filter out stuff like worry that we know better about, that we have no use for. It just sits there, continues buggy behaviour.

    It's not like I expect my wiry, skinny, Choronzon to solve everything for me, anyway.

    Today this is happening, I am going to get on his heavy-voltage whirring electronic powering conduit, and *ride current* anyway.
    I know this Choronzonica, with me, is sometimes just daft. what can I say, sometimees, it is REALLY uncanny, enough to make me rub my cheek and itchy claw.

    Why should something so scattered and often silly as Choronzon be capable of persuading me to pay attention--when advice, cautionary tales, and how does he make me management so much!

    How can a "demon" - and one which is supposed to want to make me fail, and mess up yet - end up having such an idiosyncratic affaire with me, that the result ends up that he's able to make me WANT to learn things that change me.

    That's where it has to start with me because of my dumb resistant streak when it comes to mundane manners.

    But...thank Gods, it is a phenomenator, and I love riding the thing, with sparks in the hair!

    I act but measurable progress week by week, and so, you wonaned then it's sailing pretty, all the way.

    Today is a mystery, and sort of wavy storm, a big one. There was some sort of unspecific blocking of me - from entropy, from drained food.

    A vague disquiet was felt, and I had felt scared this morn at first, knocks that out of my hands. I silently ask Choronzon and the other friendly xeno-mythopoeiacs, to flush out any further worry engendering going on, and hose it if possible, but in truth, that's not up to him, it's my job, not his.

    "Don't let the panic button push YOU..." he whispers at me, and folds himself in to a corner of a black Memory Palace wall, and he's gone. I picture my favourite xenodimensional, a Naga at the moment, half cobra, half human, but nagas don't have that stunning lithe fanning hair...Distracting thing!

    "You got to fade, now..."

    "Asta la bye, M'sila." and he is going to hang with his demonic xeno-friends, and they begin to mock him yet again, and I'm the reason, because apparently, it's a sort of a taboo, to the xenodimensionals, to carry on sexually or in any other attachmentality, with a human or sub-human, post-human, whatever!

    He seems to be more alive, and happy, and also able to fend off the wisecracks and send them into flat cells. Time for me to quit spying on them, or I'll end up vindicating them.

    I let go, now...of the lifeline of that 333 current. I can look forward to the next one.

    This all was just a dream, and I did not dream it, this time.

    ;-)

    3.3.3........3.3.3........3.3.3
    M'sila-Xenodimensional-Wrangler

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  5. Superb article, simply superb.

    This is one of the best articles on the archetypal phenomenon that you have written since the last great one on Odin.

    Why aren't Nationalists, indeed all other sociological, pschological or political commentators actually reading this and applying its conceptualism to the world?

    It's because they DON'T UNDERSTAND IT amd instead either dismiss it as all "psychological theorising", academic stuff that appears to have no "reality", or simply deny it.

    Incredible.

    Even your comments that you have posted show a a total lack of acknowledgement to your idea and understanding.

    Lee, this is great stuff and shows that you have far, far more understanding of what really makes humanity and the world turn round than the majority of academics, poiliticos and commentators.

    You said,

    "Future psychological historians, the explorers of the archetypal 'Innerverse', will one day judge the significance of the media constructed 'Black President Archetype' and its impact upon the contemporary collective unconscious, especially in relation to politics and the election of Barack Obama."

    How very true. In time science and political analysts and writers will understand the fundamental essence of the archetype and how it manifests in the human consciousnessand how it affects us as human sentient beings and our relationship with the the world and all apsects of it.

    So many good ideas and inspiration within this brief article, and so much food for thought, forv example, you wrote,

    "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."

    Spot on Lee. If only we as Nationalists and 'Explorers of the Innerverse' fully understood the totality of this statement and applied it we would have then potential of changing it to suit our own particular belief-systems and objectives.

    To begin changing the outerverse we need to change the innerverse and to bring this to manifestation through will and imagination, constructing archetypes or reinforcing old ones and imbibing them with energy and exteriorising them through mass cosnciousness.

    This is the World of the Archetype.

    This is how it Manifests.

    This is how we will can Create what we want to achieve.

    Excellent article Lee.

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