Bret Devereaux

I taught a comparative myth course for a few years and while the course was designed to bring out common motifs between world mythologies, one thing that was so striking, for instance, is how different 'gods' are from one place to the next.

Are gods immortal? Are they good? What are the scope and scale of their powers? Can they be beseeched and if so how? Are they human in form? We looked, for instance, at Loki and Anansi together - but is Anansi even a god?

Clearly there is a human tendency to imagine non-physical (=spiritual) forces in the world and to sometimes personalize those forces (but sometimes not), but beyond that? Loads of cultural contingency. Lots of similarity, but also lots of difference. Not one bland archetype.

So the idea that there is some functionally complete 'chip' that just fills in all of the details the same way every time is silly. I suspect we'll come back to this because it goes to the idea that there is a 'universal' warrior or war experience. There is no one 'war' chip.

'Archetypes...according to Jung, they are universal..if we could go to a hunter gather tribe and access their warrior archetype it would be identical to that of a cadet at west point' Sure, Jung says this, but as a statement of fact about the world...um [citation needed]!

Also, obviously not? Gat and L. Keeley (War in Human Civilization and War Before Civilization respectively) point in the direction of what war behaviors in the pre-historical past might have been like - I am largely convinced by them.

But it is a style of warfare so substantially different from 'conventional' war as waged by industrialized countries that our militaries respond with bafflement when they encounter it and call it 'unconventional' or 'asymmetric' war.

And whether it was highly trained West Point graduates or conscripted Everymen, those 'western' militaries have had to struggle to learn and adapt to that different style of warfare. There was no 'chip' they could plug in to just 'get it'

Even though, to be clear, it is *conventional* warfare that is the aberration, and 'unconventional' or 'asymmetrical' warfare which is the historic norm (I think @MilHist_Lee has a project making this point)

Also, by the by, expectations about child development and behaviors also vary quite a lot, culture to culture. Even the terms and meanings to describe different age brackets - especially when connected to social/emotional change rather than physical - are flexible.

To take Latin, a 'puer' is a boy (clear enough) but there's no word for 'teenager.' iuvenis or adulescens - sometimes translated that way - are really from about 17 to about 30 (yes, THIRTY) representing 'early adulthood' the long period of physical but not full social maturity.

The categories for Roman girls and women were even less age-linked and almost entirely about marital/sexual status. A female Roman was called a puella (girl) from actual childhood until marriage, when she became a 'mulier' (=woman) or 'matrona' (after giving birth).

As you may well imagine, the behavioral and developmental expectations that went along with that frame of thought could be very different from ours! A Roman female might be - and be expected to behave as - a 'matrona' (a full adult) in her late teens.

Those differences can't be compressed down into a single archetype. That said, it is no surprise that Jung thought they could - 19th and early 20th century scholarship is full of scholars blithely assuming that the standards of their culture were universally applicable.

The tendency to uncritically retroject modern-period European values in particular is a real enduring weakness of that older 19th and early 20th century scholarship.

He's recommending a book I haven't read 'King,Warrior, Magician,Lover: Roadmap on Traversing the Masculine Psyche' I haven't read it, so I'll reserve my comments, except its hardly a promising title Also, my cats are amusing themselves with a spring-door-stop and its hilarious

He closes on how using archetypes makes for powerful fiction. I'm sure it does. I have to admit, one thing I find truly frustrating is how many storytellers fool themselves into believing that a good story is the same as a true story...

...or that being a good storyteller equips one in any way to be a good observer of contemporary society, or understander of past societies. Lots of self-congratulatory 'stories are the most important thing' written by writers of stories.

On to Ep. 8, "The Warrior Archetype." I find it odd that we covered so much Sparta so far, but no other culture. If the goal is to prove that this archetype as universal, we haven't any comparative evidence fit for the purpose.

But if the goal was to show how Sparta conforms to this archetype, then surely we ought to have begun with the archetype and then discussed Sparta afterwards so we could see the blocks fall into place? I would not have organized things this way, but that's me.

"The warrior archetype kicks in...sometime around the age of 12, 13, 14" If this were a student paper, I'd be writing "Evidence?" in the margins. And if the citation Jung, I'd be circling the publication date and writing "be careful of very old scholarship!"

Needless to say, this is not how (good) historians make and defend arguments. But this is a historical argument being made!

"For instance...when the warrior archetype kicks in, we suddenly want to put on a football helmet and beat the crap out of our buddies on the field." Oh boy is that awkwardly universalizing the narrow US-experience when the rest of the world is thinking 'red card?'

Also, if the warrior archetype is linked to aggression, studies have shown that human aggression develops very early, often evident in infancy. Children are capable of intentionally using force on each other and violently competing for status in single-digit ages.

Personally, I am extremely competitive (too much so, honestly), but never felt the desire to express that physically. Sports of any kind never grabbed me; I always competed in mental activities. Did my 'warrior archetype' just never 'kick in?'

"We have this tremendous urge to hang around with our peers...if we're 16, 17..." Welcome to things that are very much socially contingent! Most societies do not separate into defined age-bands like this. Small hunter-gatherer groups don't (group size too small often).

The idea that all of the 18-year-olds ought to hang out together certainly doesn't appear in Greek or Roman thought, where mixed-aged groups are clearly preferred in social organization at almost every level.

My understanding is that the consensus is that the idea that defined age-bands should hang out together like that is largely a product of universal education and the need to brigade together students at similar stages of intellectual and emotional development.

Though I can't claim expertise on that point. Nevertheless, I can absolutely say it doesn't seem to me to have been a common feature in pre-modern societies, which seem to me to almost always prefer cross-age-group groupings.