Myss’s gallery of archetypes

Myss’s system is the largest and loosest of the authored lists, and the one furthest from Jung. The book asks readers to discover a pre-birth agreement about their life’s purpose by identifying the archetypes that work through them. Four are said to be present in everyone and are called survival archetypes: the Child, the Victim, the Prostitute and the Saboteur, each with a light and a shadow side. Readers then choose eight more from an appendix, “The Gallery of Archetypes”, to make a personal twelve, and place them in the twelve houses of a wheel. The count given here is four, because that is what can be verified from the book’s contents. The gallery is commonly said to hold seventy-four entries and a reviewer counts about seventy, but this site has not checked the figure against the text, and Myss invites readers to add their own, so the list is open-ended by design. A companion deck of eighty cards, each giving an archetype’s light and shadow attributes, followed in 2003 and is not reproduced here. No study has tested any part of the system.

Sources

• Myss, C. (2001). Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential. Harmony Books. ISBN 978-0-517-70392-2. Contents: chapter 4, “Speaking Archetypes: Your Four Principal Energy Companions”; appendix, “The Gallery of Archetypes”. Paperback: Three Rivers Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-609-81011-8.
• Myss, C. (2003). Archetype Cards: An 80-Card Deck with Instruction Booklet. Hay House. ISBN 978-1-4019-0184-4.
• Publisher’s description of the Three Rivers paperback (“a new theory of archetypes that builds on the works of Jung, Plato, and many other contemporary thinkers”), as carried by booksellers: https://chaucersbooks.com/book/9780609810118
• Review counting about seventy gallery entries: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/1364557-sacred-contracts-by-caroline-myss