A Definition of Archetype
from C. G. Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious pp. 5-6.
Another well-known expression of the archetypes is myth and fairytale. But here we are dealing with forms that have received a specific stamp [of a culture] and have been handed down through long periods of time. The term "archetype" thus applies only indirectly to the "representations collectives," [universal, primordial symbols] since it designates only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and are therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience. ... Especially on the higher levels of esoteric teaching the archetypes appear in a form that reveals quite unmistakably the critical and evaluating influence of conscious elaboration. Their immediate manifestation, as we encounter it in dreams and visions, is much more individual, less understandable, and more naive than in myths, for example. The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it take its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear.
.... But if we try to establish what an archetype is psychologically, the matter becomes more complicated. So far mythologists have always helped themselves out with solar, lunar, meteorological, vegetal, and other ideas of the kind. The fact that myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul is something they have absolutely refused to see until now. Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need--or rather, his unconscious psyche has an irresistible urge--to assimilate all outer sense experiences to inner, psychic events. It is not enough for the primitive to see the sun rise and set; this external observation must at the same time be a psychic happening: the sun in its course must represent the fate of a god or hero who, in the last analysis, dwells nowhere except in the soul of man. All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection--that is, mirrored in the events of nature. The projection is so fundamental that it has taken several thousand years of civilization to detach it in some manner from its outer object. ...
A SELECTIVE LIST OF MOTIFS AND ARCHETYPES
The Quest
The Journey
Sky father/Earth mother
The Mandala
Initiation
The Seasons
Mating with a mortal
Quaternity
The Underworld
The Task
Rites of passage
The Seasons
The Fall
The Call
The Sacred Marriage
The Magus
The Journey
The Origin
The Cosmic Tree
The Navel
The Call
The Last Days
Search for the Father
The Garden
Return to Paradise
Death/Rebirth
The Hero
The Tower (Edifice)
The Wise Fool
The Trickster
The War in Heaven
The Totem
The Clown
The Helper
The Devil Figure
The Hag
The Outcast
The Witch
The Double (Twins)
The Virgin
The Scapegoat
The Beast
The Temptress (Vamp)
The Shadow
The animae
The animus
The Logos
The Eros
The Mother
The Father
The Innocent
The Androgyne
The Demiurge
The Lover