the archetypal mythology of horses
Copyright
2004-2022 Beverley Kane, MD
Page 11 of 20
takes pity on him and gives him the power both to see and to fly.
The horse flies off, finds a wife, and after many years returns to the little boy,
who is now a grown man in a kingdom on the verge of war. The horse and his mare fly
off to the battleground and speak to the horses of the enemy soldiers. All the horses
collude to bring the warring armies together in the river, where they cannot shoot
eachother but get tossed into the water and can only laugh at themselves.
After peace breaks out, the horse and mare return to the kingdom of the boy-
become-man and his Father. The little horse has proven his worth and everyone lives
happily ever after. So the horses, onto which the small boy projects his hopes and
dreams, come home to roost.
The somarchetype of the horse captures our strongest Bright Shadow projections.
When I watch horses galloping across a field or bursting forth at turn out, I long for a
tiny part of that energy and strength. My body attaches itself to the powerful movement.
Whether we envy their physical prowess or idolize and idealize them as noble savages,
we are prone to investing horses with that which we yearn for and cannot fully attain.
Many myths and dream images portray Horse as the vehicle for mythical journeys and
magical powers.
TRICKSTER
The Trickster archetype holds the imp sitting on our shoulder who says, "Lighten up.
Think different. Let go." He opposes the subpersonalities who are stubborn, serious,
morbid, doctrinaire, addicted to stability and terrified of change. He attacks our fixed
ideas and our attachment to the way things are. Trickster seeks to undermine our pride,
especially when it is vested in a static self-image that stunts our spiritual growth.
Because duplicity and chicanery are generally considered unethical in Western
society, the Trickster archetype of the used car dealer or the fox is often met with the
same antipathy as is felt toward the Shadow. But Trickster is the fellow who can get us
to laugh at ourselves. He is the voice of a black person using the "n" word to his brother;
he is why we pay extra to sit in the front row at comedy clubs and get harassed by the
headliner; he is why kings had court jesters. The fool in Shakespeare is particularly
aware of when his king crosses a moral line and is in the play to remind the king of his
own folly with thinly veiled derision.
Unlike Shadow with whom we can more or less choose our skirmishes, Trickster
comes to us unannounced and on his own terms. He is the great cosmic banana peel of
the unconscious. We let him in by giving him something to work with—our hubris, our
conscious and unconscious assumptions, our prejudices, our fears, our puffed up images
of ourselves. He creates a stampede among our sacred cows when they have outlived
their usefulness or tied up our energies in old structures and systems that need to be
overturned and overhauled. Trickster forces us to break out of our stereotypes and our
boxes, whether they've been imposed by our families, our culture, or ourselves.
Carl Jung states that the trickster archetype is "a primitive cosmic being of
divine-animal nature, on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman
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