archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Apollo (Bolen)

Clear sight, clean lines, and a distance that passes for virtue.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Apollo, one of the eight god patterns of Gods in Everyman (1989) and the first of her two favoured sons: the pattern of clarity, order, aim and achievement at a distance in a man’s psychology, the type a patriarchal culture rewards.

Bolen’s Apollo is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of light, prophecy, music and the bow. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it opens the generation of the sons, and her chapter title gives its three faces: archer, lawgiver and favourite son. The man in whom Apollo predominates, as she describes him, thinks clearly, sets goals and reaches them, values order, rules and measured judgement, and does well in school, in the professions and in institutions; he prefers mind to feeling and observes from a distance rather than plunging in. Her section on cultivating Apollo says that this culture develops these traits vigorously, from the bright pupil to the “whiz kid”. The difficulties she attaches are the costs of distance: trouble with intimacy and with women, an aversion to emotional mess, and a hidden, darker side that the clear surface conceals.

Go deeper

At the threshold

The sleepless Hours who watch me as I lie,Curtained with star-inwoven tapestriesFrom the broad moonlight of the sky,Fanning the busy dreams from my dim eyes,—Waken me when their Mother, the gray Dawn,Tells them that dreams and that the moon is gone.Then I arise, and climbing Heaven’s blue dome,I walk over the mountains and the waves,Leaving my robe upon the ocean foam;My footsteps pave the clouds with fire; the cavesAre filled with my bright presence, and the airLeaves the green Earth to my embraces bare.

Public domain · Shelley, Hymn of Apollo (1824)

Apollo wakes the world with a light whose rays kill deceit, a god of clarity whose gift is brightness and whose hold is distance.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 5 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Hymn to Apollo

    Homeric Hymn 3, to Delian Apollo (Evelyn-White, 1914), -600

    The god of the lyre and bow comes into the world as the one whose song and arrows both reach far.

  2. Jung’s example

    The plague arrows

    Homer, Iliad I, -750

    Apollo descends angry from Olympus and strikes the Greek camp from a distance with his silver bow.

  3. Jung’s example

    Apollo and Daphne

    Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 8

    The god’s pursuit of a nymph who would rather become a tree is the oldest picture of Apollo’s trouble with closeness.

  4. a later reading

    Hymn of Apollo

    Shelley, Posthumous Poems, 1824

    A late reading: the sun-god as a light that kills deceit and a clarity that others fly from.

  5. a later reading

    Hyperion, Book III

    Keats, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes and Other Poems, 1820

    A late reading: the young god takes in the knowledge of the world and is transformed by it.

The wider sky

Where the Apollo (Bolen) has been seen

20 exemplars across 7 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Mute thou remainest--Mute! yet I can readA wondrous lesson in thy silent face:Knowledge enormous makes a God of me.Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions,Majesties, sovran voices, agonies,Creations and destroyings, all at oncePour into the wide hollows of my brain,And deify me, as if some blithe wineOr bright elixir peerless I had drunk,And so become immortal."--Thus the God,

Public domain · Keats, Hyperion, Book III (1820)

The young god’s knowledge pours into him and deifies him all at once, learning as a transforming power that also sets him apart.

The arrow lands because he never gets close enough to flinch.

Everything in its place, including the people.

He is praised for the order and missed for the warmth.

The deep layer · what was written

Apollo (Bolen): the entry

Definition

Bolen’s Apollo is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of light, prophecy, music and the bow. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it opens the generation of the sons, and her chapter title gives its three faces: archer, lawgiver and favourite son. The man in whom Apollo predominates, as she describes him, thinks clearly, sets goals and reaches them, values order, rules and measured judgement, and does well in school, in the professions and in institutions; he prefers mind to feeling and observes from a distance rather than plunging in. Her section on cultivating Apollo says that this culture develops these traits vigorously, from the bright pupil to the “whiz kid”. The difficulties she attaches are the costs of distance: trouble with intimacy and with women, an aversion to emotional mess, and a hidden, darker side that the clear surface conceals.

The grouping matters. Bolen divides Zeus’s sons by his attitude to them: Apollo and Hermes are the favoured sons, the two patterns that help a man get ahead in the patriarchal world, as against the rejected Ares and Hephaestus and the ambivalently viewed Dionysus. Two exclusions apply. This is not Apollo the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), among them Artemis, Apollo’s twin.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 6 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), the first chapter of part III, “The Generation of the Sons”. It begins with the god (p. 130), noting that he was second only to Zeus among the Olympians, and continues through the archetype, cultivating Apollo (p. 140), the man, his difficulties and ways to grow. Its epigraph is taken from Walter F. Otto’s The Homeric Gods (1929), and its sources include Joseph Fontenrose’s study of the Delphic myth, Python (1959). A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The myths are public domain. The Homeric hymn to Apollo tells of his birth on Delos, delayed because Hera kept the goddess of childbirth away, and contains the detail on which Bolen builds a parallel with the Apollo man’s upbringing, that the newborn god was fed by another goddess:

Now Leto did not give Apollo, bearer of the golden blade, her breast; but Themis duly poured nectar and ambrosia with her divine hands: and Leto was glad because she had borne a strong son and an archer. — Homeric Hymn to Apollo (7th–6th century BCE), ll. 123–130, trans. H. G. Evelyn-White (1914)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Bolen’s version is that the Apollo man often had a physically undemonstrative mother. The same hymn has the infant claim the lyre and the bow and promise to declare the will of Zeus (ll. 131–132), the lawgiver of her title. The archer of the Iliad shoots plague into the Greek camp from far off (1.43–52), and the hymn to Hermes ends with Zeus settling the brothers’ quarrel over the stolen cattle. The Delphic maxims, “know thyself” and “nothing in excess”, which Shepherd Bliss’s 1989 review repeats from her account, are the classical summary of the temperament.

The debate

The roster places Bolen’s Apollo nearest the persona and the hero, and neither fits closely. Jung’s persona is the mask of social adaptation that anyone wears; Bolen’s Apollo is a temperament that happens to coincide with the persona her culture prizes, which is her point about favoured sons. Jung’s hero personifies psychic energy and the ego’s struggle to win consciousness from the unconscious, a process rather than a character; Bolen’s Apollo is already a winner in the world as it is. The figure’s real lineage is older than Jung. Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) set the Apollonian, measure, form and individuation, against the Dionysian, and Bolen’s pairing of an orderly favoured son with an ambivalently viewed ecstatic son keeps that opposition while turning it into types of men. Robert Bly (1990, p. 26) used the same pair inside the men’s movement, picturing Apollo as a golden man standing on the dark, dangerous energy of Dionysus. In the analytical tradition the association has wandered: Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon (1991) attached the senex, the puer’s shadow, to Apollo rather than Saturn.

The figure drew the sharpest line in the book’s first review. Publishers Weekly (1989) quoted Bolen’s sentence that an Apollo man isn’t much of a lover as one of the book’s “thunderbolts”, and called the whole attempt to map a masculine psychology on the Greek gods “at least as simplistic as sun-sign astrology”. Shepherd Bliss (1989), writing from inside the mythopoetic men’s movement, quoted her account of an Apollo who favours thinking over feeling and distance over closeness without objection. The structural criticism applies with special force to a favoured son: Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (1992) held that Bolen identifies gods with personality types, whereas “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17), and David Tacey (1997) objected that she treats archetypes as timeless when the figures are conditioned by culture (p. 20). A type defined by success in one society is the clearest case of Tacey’s objection.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Apollo as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. Personality research on conscientiousness and on the thinking–feeling preference of type inventories describes overlapping traits, but none of it tests Bolen’s figure, and the type inventories themselves are not evidence for it.

Appearances

Bolen’s mythic instances are the archer and the lawgiver of Delphi. The classical image most often attached to the type is the Apollo Belvedere. Popular discussion of her types has named fictional detectives, investigators and ambitious second sons as Apollo men, as in a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast on the favoured sons. Apart from Bolen’s own instances, these are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

  • Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 2 and 6, pp. 130, 140; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
  • Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
  • Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
  • Homeric Hymn 3, to Apollo, ll. 89–139; Homeric Hymn 4, to Hermes. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • Homer, Iliad 1.43–52 (S. Butler, Trans., 1898). Project Gutenberg #2199.
  • Otto, W. F. (1954). The Homeric Gods (M. Hadas, Trans.; German 1929). Thames & Hudson edition 1979. ISBN 978-0-500-27144-5.
  • Nietzsche, F. (1872). The Birth of Tragedy (W. A. Haussmann, Trans., 1909). Project Gutenberg #51356.
  • Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0. P. 26.
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entry “Puer aeternus”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
  • [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
  • Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
  • Tacey, D. (1997). Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14241-0. Chapter 1, “Archetypes, gods, men and women”, p. 20.
  • Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0237, “Gods in Everyman: The Favorite Son God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0237-gods-in-everyman-the-favorite-son-god-archetypes/

Leaving

Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears,And slits the thin spun life. But not the praise,Phoebus repli'd, and touch'd my trembling ears;Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,Nor in the glistering foilSet off to th'world, nor in broad rumour lies,But lives and spreds aloft by those pure eyes,And perfet witnes of all judging Jove;As he pronounces lastly on each deed,Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed.

Public domain · Milton, Lycidas (1638)

Phoebus touches the poet’s ears to correct his hunger for fame, an Apollo who speaks of judgement and the pure eyes of heaven rather than of the crowd.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

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