archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Classical (Jung) · an archetype

Wise Old Man

The archetype of meaning.

Jung’s name for the personified form the unconscious takes when it offers knowledge, counsel or meaning the conscious mind lacks, met as magician, teacher, doctor, priest or grandfather in dreams and tales. He also called it the archetype of meaning, and earlier the mana personality.

The wise old man, in Jung’s usage, is the shape the unconscious takes when it presents the conscious mind with something it does not know: a judgement, a direction, a piece of knowledge, a sense of meaning. It appears in dreams and in fantasy as a magician, doctor, priest, teacher, professor or grandfather, and in tales as the old man who appears when the hero is stuck and gives him what he needs. Jung first described the figure in 1928 as the “mana personality”, the magician who carries the authority the ego cannot claim, and from 1934 he called it the archetype of the old wise man or of meaning, ranking it with the shadow and the anima as the three archetypes a person meets in personified form.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Now, whether it were by peculiar grace,A leading from above, a something given,Yet it befel, that, in this lonely place,When up and down my fancy thus was driven,And I with these untoward thoughts had striven,I saw a Man before me unawares:The oldest Man he seem'd that ever wore grey hairs.

Public domain · Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence (1807) · read by George

The old man appears unlooked-for at the moment the poet's thoughts have run out of road, which is the hour the vignettes give for the figure's arrival.

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

    Philemon

    Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1913

    The winged figure of Jung’s own fantasies, who taught him psychic objectivity.

  2. Jung’s example

    Hermes Trismegistus

    Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 1934

    Named by Jung with Thoth, Orpheus and Poimandres.

  3. Jung’s example

    The little grey old man

    Grimm, The Golden Goose, 1812

    The fairy-tale helper at the roadside.

  4. a later reading

    Merlin

    Emma Jung and von Franz, The Grail Legend, 1960

    A later Jungian reading of the enchanter.

  5. a later reading

    Gandalf

    Tolkien, 1954

    A critic’s reading; Tolkien’s own account of him is theological.

The wider sky

Where the Wise Old Man has been seen

50 exemplars across 17 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

Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!Ye say, ye believe in Zarathustra? But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers!Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me. So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account.Now do I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when ye have all denied me, will I return unto you.

Public domain · Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, "The Bestowing Virtue", trans. Thomas Common (1909) · a work Jung discussed · read by Bill

The teacher warns his disciples against the teacher, a resonance with the entry's caution that the figure is not simply benign and that the ego can be swallowed by the authority it projects onto him.

He turns up when you cannot go on, and gives you what you did not have: a word, a thread, a direction.

Magician, doctor, priest, teacher, grandfather. The form varies; the help is the point.

Do not assume he is good.

The deep layer · what was written

Wise Old Man: the entry

Definition

The wise old man, in Jung’s usage, is the shape the unconscious takes when it presents the conscious mind with something it does not know: a judgement, a direction, a piece of knowledge, a sense of meaning. It appears in dreams and in fantasy as a magician, doctor, priest, teacher, professor or grandfather, and in tales as the old man who appears when the hero is stuck and gives him what he needs. Jung first described the figure in 1928 as the “mana personality”, the magician who carries the authority the ego cannot claim, and from 1934 he called it the archetype of the old wise man or of meaning, ranking it with the shadow and the anima as the three archetypes a person meets in personified form.

Two qualifications belong to the definition. The figure is not simply benign: Jung insisted that spirit, like every archetype, has a double nature, and that when the ego is swallowed by it the archetype of meaning becomes a destructive one. And the figure is gendered by its author. Jung assigned the Wise Old Man to a man’s psychology and gave a woman the Chthonic Mother as its counterpart; the “wise old woman” was supplied, with some difficulty, by writers after him.

History

The figure precedes the term. Jung’s memoir describes the fantasy figure Philemon, an old man with a bull’s horns and kingfisher’s wings who emerged around 1913:

Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. — C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), chapter 6, “Confrontation with the Unconscious”

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

In the same pages Jung calls Philemon his psychagogue and his guru. The first theoretical name came in the 1928 essay “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (CW 7), whose closing chapters treat the “mana-personality”, the magician or hero whose power the ego is tempted to claim as its own after the anima has been withdrawn from projection (CW 7 ¶377 and ¶389, as given in Sharp 1991). The sentence in the CW text that names this magician the “wise old man” belongs to the revised essay, not to the 1928 translation, and should not be backdated.

The archetype proper is named in the Eranos lecture “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, delivered in 1934 and revised for CW 9i in 1954; the English used here is the 1939 translation in The Integration of the Personality, which stands closer to the lecture. Commenting on a theologian’s dream in which a wise magician speaks with an authority far beyond the dreamer’s, Jung writes:

The magician is the archetype of the old wise man, and the latter is a direct descendant of the medicine man with his function in primitive society. Like the anima, he is an immortal demon, and he penetrates the chaotic darkness of mere life with the light of meaning. — C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1934), in The Integration of the Personality (1939), p. 87

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The next page gives the name that stuck: Jung says he has been content to call it “the archetype of the old wise man or of meaning”, lists Hermes Trismegistus and Poimandres as older formulations, reads Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as an involuntary confession of the same figure, and groups shadow, anima and old wise man as the three archetypes met in personified form (pp. 88–89). A few pages on he gives the warning: when the shadow assimilates the ego, the anima possesses it and spirit, “the archetype of meaning”, becomes a destructive wrongdoer (p. 92). The dream series later in the same book speaks of “the old wise man or ‘mana personality’” (p. 127; CW 12 ¶121), and in Psychology and Alchemy (1944), where that series was reprinted, the wise old man appears as the archetypal father figure who initiates the dreamer into the meaning of life (CW 12 ¶159).

The fullest treatment is the 1945 Eranos lecture “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales”, revised in 1948 and collected in CW 9i, which reads the old man of the tales as the personification of spirit, appearing when the hero has no way forward, and insists on his ambiguous, sometimes wicked side. It is this essay that lists the magician, doctor, priest, teacher, professor and grandfather as the figure’s usual disguises (CW 9i ¶398, as given in Sharp 1991). Aion (1951) fixes his place in the structure. The anima gives a man a triad; the fourth element that completes it is “the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which I have not discussed here, and in a woman the Chthonic Mother” (CW 9ii ¶42). Jethro, the Midianite priest who counsels Moses, is the worked example:

He is, accordingly, a numinous personality, the embodiment of an archetype, obviously that of the “wise old man” who personifies the spirit in myth and folklore. — C. G. Jung, Aion (1951), CW 9ii ¶362

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The Moses quaternio places him where, for a woman, the Great Mother would stand (¶329).

The debate

The classical school kept the figure and widened it. Marie-Louise von Franz (1970) treats the old man of the fairy tales as the usual helper who brings purposeful reflection and objective thinking, with the proviso that a merely good or merely bad old man shows only half the archetype, Merlin being the case of the double aspect. Murray Stein (1998) lists “the crone and the wise old man” among the age-specific images in which the one archetype of the self is expressed across a life. Andrew Samuels (1985) records the common classification that places the “archetypes of the spirit (wise old man and woman)” above shadow and anima and below the self, and warns that patients who announce that their “wise old man” is speaking are often performing an intellectual exercise with no contact with the unconscious.

The archetypal school dissolved the figure into a pair. James Hillman’s Eranos lecture “Senex and Puer” (1967, revised in Puer Papers, 1979) treats the senex as a style of consciousness, Saturnine, ordered, melancholy, intelligible only beside the puer it represses. Donald Kalsched (1996) summarises the consequence: the negative senex, cold, dry and tyrannical, is “the senex split from its own puer aspect”, and single static images like the wise old man or the Great Mother miss the tandems in which archetypal material actually arrives. Hillman’s own verdict on his teacher, in Inter Views (1983), is that Jung “worked out of the old wise man of nature”, which Hillman does not.

The gender critique starts from Jung’s own text. Aion gives the wisdom figure to men and the Chthonic Mother to women; “wise old woman” is a later writers’ supplement, not a term Jung formally paired with it. The asymmetry passed into the men’s movement, where James Hollis (1994) observed that Bly, Meade and Hillman “symbolically evoke the wise elders” for uninitiated men, and where Moore and Gillette’s The Magician Within (1993) renamed the figure for a masculine taxonomy. Samuels (1993) calls classical Jungian gender psychology ahistorical and essentialist, and Polly Young-Eisendrath (1997) reads its “masculine” and “feminine” as cultural constructions. The emergent school has no use for the figure as such: Jean Knox (2003) rejects any archetype with built-in content, so a wise old man can only be a cultural elaboration, not an inherited image.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested the wise old man as a psychological construct and no instrument measures it. The nearest mainstream research is the psychology of wisdom, which since Baltes and Staudinger (2000) has treated wisdom as expert knowledge about the conduct of life, without reference to Jung.

Appearances

Jung’s own instances are the best documented: Philemon, Zarathustra, Hermes Trismegistus, and Jethro in Exodus. Merlin is the standard medieval case. Emma Jung and von Franz (1960) read him in the Grail romances as the archetype of the Wise Old Man who appears again and again to the seeker, “admonishing, criticizing and showing the way”; the primary text in English is Malory (c. 1470). The Grimm collection has him in miniature: the little grey man of “The Golden Goose” and the old man of “The Water of Life”. Joseph Campbell (1949) built the figure into his monomyth as “Supernatural Aid”, the protective figure, “often a little old crone or old man”, and in his prologue compared the analyst to “the Wise Old Man of the myths and fairy tales”. The stage-name “Meeting the Mentor” is Christopher Vogler’s (1992), not Campbell’s; Carol Pearson’s “Sage” (1991) belongs to a separately organised twelve-type system and is not an established renaming of Jung’s figure. Gandalf is the example most readers reach for; Tolkien’s own account, in a 1954 letter, is theological, an “angel incarnate”, and the Jungian reading is a critic’s. Except for Jung’s own figures and Campbell’s deliberate borrowing, “wise old man” is in every case a reading, not the author’s intention.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. CW 7, part two, chapter on the mana-personality; ¶377 and ¶389 as given in Sharp (1991).
  • Jung, C. G. (1934). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. CW 9i (Eranos lecture 1934, revised 1954). English in The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans., 1939), chapter 3, pp. 87–89 and 92; p. 127 for “mana personality”. Farrar & Rinehart.
  • Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12 ¶121, ¶159.
  • Jung, C. G. (1948). The phenomenology of the spirit in fairytales (Eranos lecture 1945, revised 1948). CW 9i; ¶398 as given in Sharp (1991).
  • Sharp, D. (1991). Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms and Concepts. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-48-9. Entries “Mana-personality” and “Spirit”. https://www.jungpage.org/learn/jung-lexicon
  • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶42, ¶237, ¶329, ¶362. Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (A. Jaffé, Ed.; R. and C. Winston, Trans.). Vintage edition 1989, chapter 6. ISBN 978-0-679-72395-0.
  • Jung, E., & von Franz, M.-L. (1960/1970). The Grail Legend. Princeton University Press edition 1998. ISBN 978-0-691-00237-8. Chapters on Perceval and Merlin.
  • von Franz, M.-L. (1970). The Interpretation of Fairy Tales (rev. ed. 1996). Shambhala. ISBN 978-0-87773-526-7. Passage on the old man as spirit and the double aspect of Merlin.
  • Hillman, J. (1979). Senex and puer: an aspect of the historical and psychological present (Eranos lecture 1967). In Puer Papers. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-310-1.
  • Hillman, J. (1983). Inter Views: Conversations with Laura Pozzo. Spring Publications. ISBN 978-0-88214-348-4. Chapter 3.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapters 2, 5 and 7.
  • Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 8, “Reflecting on men”.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9.
  • Hollis, J. (1994). Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-64-9.
  • Kalsched, D. (1996). The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-12329-7. Chapter 5, section on Hillman and the senex/puer split.
  • Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter on individuation.
  • Young-Eisendrath, P. (1997). Gender and Desire: Uncursing Pandora. Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-0-89096-746-1.
  • Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-129-7. Chapter 3.
  • Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: a metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55(1), 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.122
  • Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press edition 1972. ISBN 978-0-691-01784-6. Prologue, section 1, and part I, chapter I, section 3.
  • Vogler, C. (1992). The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Michael Wiese Productions. ISBN 978-0-941188-13-5.
  • Pearson, C. S. (1991). Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250678-8. Chapter 16, “The Sage”.
  • Grimm, J., & Grimm, W. (1812–15). Grimms’ Fairy Tales (E. Taylor et al., Trans.). Project Gutenberg #2591. “The Golden Goose”, “The Water of Life”.
  • Malory, T. (c. 1470). Le Morte d’Arthur, volume 1. Project Gutenberg #1251.
  • Tolkien, J. R. R. (1981). The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (H. Carpenter, Ed.). HarperCollins edition. ISBN 978-0-261-10265-1. Letter 156 (1954) for “angel incarnate”.

Leaving

Not of the sunlight,Not of the moonlight,Not of the starlight!O young Mariner,Down to the haven,Call your companions,Launch your vessel,And crowd your canvas,And, ere it vanishesOver the margin,After it, follow it,Follow The Gleam.

Public domain · Tennyson, Merlin and the Gleam (1889) · read by Daniel

The dying magician hands on not an answer but a direction, the thread the young must now follow without him.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey✺ SelfThe centre and the whole circumference.Return to the void