Archetype is a word with many meanings in different contexts, but here we are to approach them in the sense of Jungian archetypes, though I believe that they transcend the realm of mere psychology. Or perhaps the psyche transcends the limitations of the science that tries to derive logos of it. Whatever the case is, Jung developed his idea of archetypes from Plato's idea of forms. Plato thought that the material world was not as real as the world of ”forms”, the non-physical, absolute, timeless essences of things. Material things were but projections of these forms in Plato's thought.
Jung's idea is decidedly psychological, and he sees archetypes as universal inherited ideas, patterns of thought or images present in the collective unconscious of a species. These archetypes form the basis of much of humanity's myths, stories and dreams across different cultures. Examples of very widespread archetypes include ones relating to family such as the mother, the father and the child. Other very widespread archetypes relating to human social formations are ones such as the emperor, the empress, the sage and the hermit. Sometimes these archetypes representing the human roles can also be deities or demigods. For example, a goddess might represent the archetype of the mother.
There are also archetypes that are often not played out by humans. The tricker is, for whatever reason, an extremely widespread archetype and it's not always a human. In fact, tricksters are often deities or supernatural entities. In European folklore the fae are a prime example. In Japanese folklore the kitsune and tengu fill this role. Some archetypes are events. The flood, the rebirth, the initiation and the hiding of the sun are examples of such.
Archetypes in Jungian psychology
In Jungian psychology the archetypes are seen as being something that's inherently part of humans, a kind of psychological counterpart to instinct that allows humans to orient themselves in the world. They seem to possess a kind of will of their own and seek to become actualized over the course of human life. The child becomes the adult, the adult grows old and then prepares for death. Some of these archetypes become expressed, while others stay dormant or become the shadow of a human. The shadow represents traits that people loathe in themselves, but there are also so-called ”golden shadows” too. They are positive traits that are repressed because the individual doesn't believe they are capable of acting them out or because they are somehow contrary to their personality construct.
Another cluster of archetypes that gets repressed are the anima and the animus. In Jungian psychology, as in Western esoteric tradition, it's seen that the human psyche, or soul, has both masculine and feminine features, regardless of biological sex. People however tend to repress characteristics of the opposite gender in themselves. This can be to some extent necessary for acting out the expected roles, but it can also lead to psychological issues and difficulties in relationships with members of the opposite gender. It's thought that one's feelings and perceptions towards the opposite gender reflect how well-developed and in tune one is with his or her anima or animus.
Jung's views have been blamed to be eurocentric, and certainly not archetypes translate so easily across cultures. For example, ”the emperor” has different connotations in Europe, where one would think of secular, martial leaders such as Julius Caesar or Napoleon than in Japan where the emperor has always had a more religious, symbolic role. There however is some overlap, and sometimes in surprising places. In European esoteric tradition, the empress is associated with spiritual power, perhaps reflecting that the influence of such figures was historically more subtle, yet still felt. In Japanese history and mythology, the empresses who reigned are thought to have had exceptional spiritual power and have been a very direct link to the kami. This perhaps reflects a historically reality and Amaterasu Oomikami-sama's role as the head of the heavenly kami.
Some archetypes in Touhou
It should be acknowledged that every culture most likely produces it's own subset of archetypes that to some extent reflect their culture, especially when it comes to human archetypes. This does not mean that comparison is not possible, but that rather the comparison should be made and that we shouldn't too strongly project our own ideas onto others. Unfortunately, as much as I've studied about Japanese culture, I am not Japanese and I can not give the native view into the character archetypes present in Touhou. A field I would be particularly interested in is the possible relation of I Ching, which seems to describe a kind of system of archetypal events, and whether one can find connections to it in Touhou. But nonetheless, we can look at Gensokyo with the understanding of archetypes and an open mind to look at a few examples.
Hakurei Reimu fits the archetype of The Fool. Taken from Tarot, yet found across all kinds of stories, the Fool is not a Fool in the sense we would use it today, but a spontaneous, free-spirited wanderer who is open to possibilities. Every new Touhou game represents a new beginning, and Reimu's power of ”floating over life” that loses its power when soiled by selfish motives or when she loses her track not only recalls Taoism but also the Fool archetype.
As one could expect of a fantasy setting, there are several magicians to be found in Gensokyo. Magic is seen as a force that can manifest the seemingly impossible into the material world. The Magician can bring their will and the resources around them into a single cohesive force via single minded focus and achieve their goals. Our second default protagonist, Marisa Kirisame, learned her powers through hard work and concentration, and she achieves the seemingly impossible by cooking dazzling spells out of mushrooms. Unfortunately, her goals also include thieving. Patchouli Wisdom is another interesting representative of this archetype, as she is powerful and committed, but her ill health prevents her from casting her best magic. A stark reminder for us to take care of our mortal coils?
Another interesting pair to look at are the members of Hifuu Club. Renko, while being a woman, represents more masculine characteristics, suggested by her way of dressing, her orientation towards the intellectual craft of physics and the tomboyish and brash actions she takes during the course of the stories. Her black and white color scheme might be a reference to binary, or possibly yin and yang. She is, after all, a woman with a quite prominent animus. Maribel is the more feminine of the two and she is interested in the more intuitive field of psychology. Her powers of accessing unseen worlds via dreams are downright magical, and it's a strangely common cultural trope that women are more naturally talented at magic. The color purple, which she wears, is in some traditions associated with spiritual powers.
Collective unconscious or Spirit World?
Overall, Jungian psychology, inspired by Western esoteric traditions yet using the language of psychology, has always been in a bit of a strange place. No mechanism of transmission for archetypes acceptable to modern science have been found. The collective unconscious remains equally mysterious. Certain archetypes are such that they could simply emerge over and over as elements of culture from observation of human culture, but certain others are more puzzling. The supernatural tricksters and certain archetypal stories such as the descent into the underworld and the rebirth that follows are more troubling.
However, if we replace ”the collective unconscious” with ”the spirit world” (remember, we are spirits too) things start to click into place in new ways. Of course some of the archetypes might still be entirely cultural phenomena, but if one recalls Peter J. Carroll's ideas, it becomes apparent that such consistently found patterns might build up very consistent egregores – or spirits. Thus we find similar deities in great many pantheons. Of course the relationship might be the other way around, too. Absolutely nothing stops the Platonic idea of forms being right, and thus first came the mother, the father, the child and then the human equivalents. I can not offer you a precise ontology of the spirit world. If I could, this would be the single most important text that humanity has ever produced.
Treating the collective unconscious as a spirit world also explains some of the more unusual archetypes associated with supernatural events. If the trickster spirits are trickster spirits, the celestials are celestials and the demons are demons and the ghosts are ghosts, there is very little need for any kind of psychologization or other kinds of mental gymnastics. This also makes it possible that non-human forms of intelligence could have generated such spirits.
The tricksters might be so tricky because they are not of human origin, and thus operate completely differently. Once again: what would the egregore – the spirit – of a forest look like? It would also make people's experiences of communicating with non-humans like plants or animals in the spirit real legitimate. Once again, it could be that these too are projections of some deeper world of ideas. We could also have visitors from entirely different worlds, too, be they planets or even more distant, weirder places.
Certain recurring event archetypes could also be explained as something that we can access from the spirit world, such monumental events that have left an irremovable mark in whatever the substrate of the spirit world is. The idea of accessing knowledge from the spirit world is a well established idea known as akashic archives. The flood and the hiding of the sun might be memories of things that didn't even happen to humans if we take the idea of non-human intelligences seriously. Certain archetypal events could be hints of experiences that transcend our everyday experiences. The going into the underworld and returning might be a memory of what might happen to us after we die. After all, cases of alleged reincarnation where the person who is born again remembers verifiable details of their past life are so common that they can't be ignored.
Archetypes and human-spirit interaction
Which comes first, the spirits or the matter, I do not know. But the concept of a spirit world opens up some rather interesting possibilities. What is there to stop the various spirits from mingling with each other in unexpected ways? Attributes associated with biological life might not apply to them, but let's consider the following. Since it appears that it's possible for spirits to some extent change their form, or at least how they are expressed, they appear to be capable of some kind of evolution. Is it possible then for spirits to reproduce? Or to hybridize? Since it appears that entire ecosystems can have a spirit or an egregore, this appears to be a possibility. Could the human and non-human spirits of a particular location hybridize, become tangled together? Can non-human spirits access traces of human knowledge in the spirit world?
Archetypes still maintain their psychological social function if we see them as spirits. Rather than being a merely inborn human phenomenon, they become entities who we can look up to for inspiration and to whom we can tune in to, tap in to. Sometimes you don't even have to call for them, they come for you. The archetypes of inspirational figures could very well simply be the spirits of inspirational figures that existed, too. In Japanese culture it's thought that people who die become kami, and if treated well will guide and protect the living. Every culture might thus have its own repository of such ”ujigami”, and part of our current psychosocial pathologies might simply stem from the way we mistreat them. We constantly try to cut our roots in pursuit of increasingly dystopian utopian phantasmagorias.
Archetypes can also possibly serve as the mechanism by which people get the kind of ”supernormal” knowledge that is often reported with spirit encounters. Representations of archetypes can capture immensive amounts of information, history, hopes and dreams into very simple representations. A simple Tarot card can stand for such immense forces of history it's dizzying. A single forest can represent all forests. And maybe it really is possible to see the universe in dewdrop. It's almost as if they are a kind of a compressed file, to use an analogue that is probably very wrong. When one stretches their cognition, learns more deeply of the things these archetypes stand for, they can very rapidly start to take a life of their own. And when they do, we can connect to unfathomably vast and deep things and come back changed.
The search for spirits in modern world
When we become enraptured by characters deemed fictional, we might be expressing a desire to tap into the archetype they represent. And sometimes this representation might very well act as a kind of an interface to a real spirit that just might be able to fulfil such a desire. It's this tapping into the spirit that seems so forgotten in many cultures, yet so prevalent in shamanism that was once found everywhere. Coincidentally or not, Japan is one of the rare industrialized countries where some remnants of this linger, as much as they tried to suppress such during the Meiji Restoration.
Therefore, the pop culture obsession, while symptomatic, becomes not a symptom of some monotheistic or individualistic spiritual decline, but a symptom of a spiritual ecology deprived of nutrients for the soul. We become obsessed with Marvel superheroes or Baldur's Gate 3 characters or – yes, I admit the possibility – the fine ladies from Touhou not because we are some morally, spiritually decayed culture, but precisely because the spiritual, moral impulse lingers.
We develop these obsessions because we are so keenly aware of how hollow and morally and spiritually bankrupt so many of the established religions are. We develop these obsessions because we know so many of the esoteric orders are full of shit and serve as nothing but money making schemes or cults that prop up their leaders. The individualists won and made a hell on Earth. The plan was never that everyone would become some kind of illuminated sage and a fully actualized citizen as they claimed. We destroy our very Earth to satisfy the excessive needs that are pushed onto us. These needs are but a dark mirror of the endless cravings of the sociopathic new aristocracy which rules over us with perfected secular and spiritual techniques of manipulation. And most shamefully of all, this new aristocracy is increasingly revealed not to be some kind of illuminated sages but petulant manchildren.
We are given shit, and from that shit we try to dig out the pearls, only to be told by some clique of elitists who fancy to be part of that new aristocracy that it's their empty halls of heaven or ghost of supposed great spiritual leaders or shattered remnants of some clay tablet where we should search for the divine instead.
Somehow, I feel like ZUN could agree with this sentiment.
If nothing else, it certainly seems that his ”heat of life” and ”explosion of creativity”, his deep interest in real-life mythology, religion, legends, paranormal lore and fringe science has made for one exceptionally big and bright pearl amongst the shit. If Touhou is slop, it's at least home-cooked slop with nutritional value.
If we were to stay merely in the world of archetypes, egregores and discarnate spirits, we might be satisfied to come to the conclusion that the experience of numinosity we (I presume you have felt it too, since you have endured this far) feel from Touhou might simply be a symptom of a desire to connect with archaic spiritual forces. We might be satisfied (or horrified) to see that Touhou is, at the least by a socio-psychological definition, an egregore. We might even see that it might be an egregore in a spiritual sense, given life by the various emotions, impulses, hopes and dreams of its countless fans.
It's however time to start calling egregores what they really are regardless of their origin – spirits.
And with this new lens we are going to explore the possibility that Touhou is not just a symptom of an unfulfilled craving or something entirely conjured forth by humans.
Consider the following: if we can have spirits of the land, and if there happened to be a land which served as a model for Gensokyo, could the spirits of this particular land serve as the seed from which Touhou sprouted?
