Tracking The Victim Archetype

October 27, 2016 — #ancestors #archetypes # insight #history, #Caroline Myss #Archetype# wholeness, mentality, sacred contracts, victim

birth chart

Carolynn Myss defines the victim archetype in her Sacred Contracts course as one of the essential characters we all embody at some point in our lives.  There are four survival archetypes present in all of us representing life challenges and our methods of maintaining self-esteem.  These four are child, victim, saboteur, and prostitute.  The lesson each one offers pertains to use of power and self-image.  The child is needy, showing us good reason to strive for learning and independence.  The victim endures bullying of various kinds in order to learn courage.  Eventually the victim teaches us how to recognize and stand up to bullies.  The prostitute teaches the value of  maintaining  integrity.  Once the prostitute recognizes the folly of selling him or herself for support of others, individual mature ethics are developed.  The sabatuer archetype lets us know when we are working against our own best interests.  Self sabotage can be avoided once we learn to spot it.  These universal psychological traits can be traced through the stories of our lives, and interact with the other 8 archetypes in our make up.

I have gotten far enough in the course to have drawn my archetypal wheel, which is played out exactly like the wheel in an astrology chart.  The number 12 was chosen because it already has meaning in astrology.  In reality we all have more than 12 archetypes, an unknown number.  To make a practical study and apply it in a personal way the student is asked to identify the 8 most pronounced archetypes present in our lives.  Placing the archetype in a house creates a kind of map.  The combination of the house and the character tell a story about an aspect of our nature as it reacts with a certain aspect of our circumstances.

I find it interesting to compare the symbolic characters in my astrology chart with those in my archetypal wheel. My victim is in the 12th house, which rules self undoing and our unconscious.  In my astrology chart my 12th house is loaded.  It contains Venus, North Node, Jupiter and Mars.  If I believe these charts my shadow side must be a deeply intuitive victim.  It is very hard for me to see myself as a victim, although I have a normal life with ups and downs.  Our shadow is not our bad or undesirable part, but the part of ourselves about which we remain unaware. As I take up my course work I need to write essays about when and where I encountered these archetypes in my history.  I met them in others and played them all myself.  The goal of the course is to learn about the dynamics of the soul.  I have my work cut out for me on this victim essay.  It should prove to be very self revealing.  Have you ever studied the archetypes, gentle reader?  Astrology is based on archetypes assigned to each house and each planet.  The symbols represent characters we can recognize as actors in our world.  When you hear the word victim, who pops into your mind?

archetypal wheel