Archetype and Character : Eros

Eros with the bow (1753)

(replica of the Eros de Thespies by Lysippe)

Walter Odajnyk

Archetype and Character

Power, Eros, Spirit, and Matter Personality Types

Eros

Although in the popular imagination Eros is seen in personal and human terms as love, it is primarily an abstract and cosmic principle. As I will be using the term, Eros is the force in the universe that seeks union, not through domination, will or control, but through connection or relation. One should keep in mind, however, that connections and relationships can be either positive or negative, for conflict is also a connection. The first sentence of Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites states:

“The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love.”

Both love and hate, harmony and strife, therefore, are under the purview of Eros and where possible, it seeks to unite them, even if the union is a paradoxical one, as the epigraph to Jung’s other alchemical treatise, The Psychology of the Transference, makes clear: “A warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil.” Eros holds the universe together, whether in enmity or love, keeping it from splitting into meaningless, disconnected, chaotic fragments.

In an Orphic myth, for instance, Eros was the first deity hatched out of the “cosmic egg” and the first opposites, heaven and earth, were formed from the two halves of the broken shell. As the first being to emerge out of the primordial unity of the cosmic egg, Eros retains the chief characteristic of its origins, namely oneness and wholeness, and forever strives to bring about that original state of unity and unite all the opposites once again. Consequently, one could see Eros as a regressive force, supremely conservative. It functions in a compensatory manner to the innovative, expansive creative principle and seeks a reintegration, a return to the source. In human beings that compensatory function is experienced as nostalgia.

In its negative expression, Eros is also behind the destructive impulse that seeks to return all forms and beings to their original undifferentiated condition. (Freud’s description of the death instinct as the drive that seeks a return to the inorganic primeval state of being discloses this aspect of Eros. From my perspective, however, Freud’s distinction between the death drive and Eros is essentially a distinction within the archetype of Eros itself.) Watching

children at play, one can see both creative and destructive sides of Eros. At the beach, for instance, both boys and girls love building sand castles and derive equal pleasure from destroying them.

The representations of Eros as a winged youth with bow and arrow (the Hindu Kama, the Greek Eros), refer to the human and personal aspects of this cosmic principle. His arrows, representing the projection of the romantic urge, with its amalgam of biological and psychological drives, inflict wounds and passion (literally, “suffering”) that can only

be healed by a union with the beloved. Originally the ancient Greeks regarded Eros as one of the winged Spites, such as old age, disease, labor and vice, that were let loose upon the world when Pandora opened the box in which Prometheus had imprisoned them. Only in later antiquity did Eros become “sentimentalized as a beautiful youth.” The Renaissance images of “erotes”, cherubic children and infants, represent the “love child,” the fruit of love, whether as an actual child or as the loving feelings born of the mutual attraction.

Romantic love, coitus and marriage, with their positive and negative potentialities, therefore, are expressions of the underlying meaning of the archetype of Eros, as the force desirous of the cohesion and continuity of the cosmos. In its striving for reintegration and oneness, Eros must reconcile differences and overcome the conflict and separation of opposites. The cross, with its horizontal and vertical lines meeting in the center, is one of the symbols of the union of opposites; it seems fitting, therefore, that in Christian mythology the God of Love sacrificed himself and redeemed humankind on the cross. The Taoist yin/yang emblem and the intertwined downward and upward pointing triangles of the Star of David are other symbols depicting the paradoxical and allencompassing aim of this archetype.

Alchemy never tired of creating new images of the union of opposites, among them, the philosophers’ stone, the golden flower, the hermaphrodite. Actually, given the goal of the alchemical opus, one could see the work guided not only by Hermes/Mercurius, who — as the prima materia at the beginning of the work and the lapis at the end of the work — embodies all universal opposites, but equally by the archetype of Eros. In this way, the alchemical Mercurius needs to be seen as an aspect of Eros.

The alchemists’ dedication to the investigation of spirit or soul embodied in matter and its redemption through the work of humankind, remind us that the arrows of Eros may fall not just onto human beings, but also onto nature or onto God. In fact, participation in any human endeavor, science, religion, politics, business, art, literature or music for example, may be a passion, again for good or ill, inspired by the arrows of Eros. Many Eros types find more personal satisfaction in these cultural areas than in personal love or human relationships.

Symbolically, the “arrow” and the “net” are the chief objects with which Eros seeks to accomplish its purpose. As we have seen, the arrows represent the psychological process of projection. (I use the term “projection” in the Jungian sense, referring to the spontaneous tendency of the psyche to project its unconscious contents unto the external world and not in the Freudian sense as a defense mechanism.) Projection creates a bridge between our psyche and the world and fosters relationships. Without projection there would be no connection, no fascination, no passion and no desire to know the universe and others.

The veil of Maya is the Indian image of this projection-making tendency of the psyche. The veil of Maya is the “net” that envelops the entire universe and holds it together. Never mind that Maya is an illusory, deceptive, ephemeral unity that must be “seen through” to attain knowledge of ultimate reality and unity with Brahma. The projections of romantic Eros are also illusory and, in time, fall away to reveal the possibilities of a real, or more objective, relationship and love. Paradoxically, these illusions lead to reality and ultimately aim at connection and unity.

In our culture the spider and its “net” are regarded as symbols of the destructive entanglement in the web of illusions. But in many non-Western mythologies the spider is a creator god, a culture hero or a psychopomp; that is, a guide of the soul. The spider’s thread is considered the umbilical cord, the golden chain or the link between the created and the creator, and can be used to climb back up and return to one’s origins. In Mid-Eastern myths, gods have nets to catch human beings and bind them to their will. In Persia, the mystics arm themselves with nets to capture God and become one with their Beloved.

In Greek myth it seems fitting that Hephaistos captures his wife, Aphrodite, and her lover, Ares, in flagrante delicto with an invisible net : here, for all the gods to see, the God of War and the Goddess of Love are caught in a union with the entangling strands of Eros. For unlike the gods of Power, who rely upon overt commands and force to achieve their ends, Eros is more subtle, though no less effective, in attaining its ends, relying upon illusion, deception, seduction and fascination, as well as empathy, compassion, relatedness and love.

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