Saucers of the Illuminati

[David Guyatt]

If you consider Cthulhu as master of the Abyss, you can substitute the collective unconscious for Abyss with undifferentiated aspects of the archetypes, for example, the both good and evil gods or angels of the Yezidi pantheon, and Lovecraft is constantly seeking doorways or gates, access, to the treasure-trove of imagery in the collective unconscious. Some of his stories use the symbol of a silver key to unlock those gates to dreamland, and these particular stories tie in with his own explorations into his ancestry, he regresses to an ancestor in what he consistently refers to as Devonshire in England in the 17th century.

I think we are in broad agreement about the CU. I should really go upstairs and consult Jung's Collected Works for his precise definition and transcribe it here, but I am feeling too lazy I'm afraid (a tough day on the gold course is my excuse!), but the following extract seems pretty okay to me.

http://www.thesap.org.uk/jung-s-model-of-the-psyche

The collective unconscious
The theory of the collective unconscious is one of the distinctive features of Jung’s psychology. He took the view that the whole personality is present in potentia from birth and that personality is not solely a function of the environment, as was thought at the time when he was developing his ideas, but merely brings out what is already there. The role of the environment is to emphasise and develop aspects already within the individual.
Every infant is born with an intact blueprint for life, both physically and mentally, and while these ideas were very controversial at the time, there is much more agreement now that each animal species is uniquely equipped with a repertoire of behaviours adapted to the environment in which it has evolved. This repertoire is dependent on what ethologists call ‘innate releasing mechanisms’ which the animal inherits in its central nervous system and which become activated when appropriate stimuli are encountered in the environment. These ideas are very close indeed to the theory of archetypes developed by Jung.
He wrote:
‘the term archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a “pattern of behaviour”. This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology’. (CW18, para 1228).
The archetypes predispose us to approach life and to experience it in certain ways, according to patterns laid down in the psyche. There are archetypal figures, such as mother, father, child, archetypal events, such as birth, death, separation, and archetypal objects such as water, the sun, the moon, snakes, and so on. These images find expression in the psyche, in behaviour and in myths. It is only archetypal images that are capable of being known and coming to consciousness, the archetypes themselves are deeply unconscious and unknowable.
I have mentioned the biological, instinctual pole of the archetype, but Jung perceived the concept as a spectrum, there being an opposing, spiritual pole which also has an enormous impact on behaviour. Archetypes have a fascinating, numinous quality to them which makes them difficult to ignore, and attracts people to venerate or worship archetypal images.

Meanwhile mucho gracias for the .pdf. I'll settle in to read this when I return from my holiday-cum-French odyssey... Yum. Slurp. Belch!