What exactly is an Archetype? 2
Here is another way to approach the definition of an archetype.
Every being lives in many worlds simultaneously.
At the most basic level, one of those worlds can be described as valuing only objective truths. It does not deal primarily with physical "realities" simply because physical realities are less "objectively true" than certain other realities.
For example, one "truth" might be "Any physical object can be perceived many different ways". Two less objective truths would be "That mountain is tall" and "That mountain is small".
It is useful here to equate objective truth with light (awareness). So, for example, the "reality" of a person's need for a candy bar has a small amount of light (which can be traced to something with more light) and the reality of a person's need for nourishment in general has substantially more light (and can also be traced to things with more and less light).
Likewise anything that can be perceived exists as somewhere on the continuum (having more or having less) of light.
Two groups.
Sports team. In your world perhaps your sport team has a lot of significance. It is a completely real thing that contains a lot of energy. This energy has some important qualities. 1) It is dependent on a group. It only exists because the group you are in says it exists, and its value (and other qualities) are determined by the group. 2) Ideally, the purpose of the group is to teach its members certain things and then see those individuals leave the group, like a family. A group that is not self limiting is a cancer. 3) The group contains a "secret" component, a part that any individual genuinely within the group cannot fully perceive the meaning of.
Human race. In the human race a person can says some things broadly. The life cycle includes being born, maturing, having children and then dying. There is no person who is "authorized" to alter this process, neither for themself nor for anyone else. It has similarities to a sport team in that there are rules, but it is different in that the rules are enforced "objectively" (i.e., by nature). When someone is a child, it is not yet their time to have children or die. That rule is from nature, similar to "In the morning the sun will rise in the east".
These two groups, sports team and human race, each contain their own languages.
Some words / meanings overlap, but there is an important difference between the two. The language common to members of a sports team is determined by consensus while the language common to humans is determined by nature.
Why is this important to understand?
There are some things that are "above" or "beyond" human will. If a person "learns" from sports that they can "accomplish anything" but they do not learn the basic ethics of that sport, they will go into the world imagining that their small will is the will of nature. If it is not raining and they think it should be raining, they will say "Nature has made a mistake, I will try to fix it.".
How does this apply to archetypes?
The world we live in consciously is constructed by language. It is very rare in modern society to find a truly spontaneous person. When people want to learn to get away from their book learnt thinking they buy a book to show them how, and what they learn is more deception.
The goal in learning an element of language (e.g. a word) is to understand it in a way that does not include inaccuracies. For example, if you learn the word "dog" while working at a prestigious kennel, you may learn that the word "dog" can refer to magnificently groomed and trained animals as well as mangy muts. The word has a lot of energy, whether positive or negative.
