Education with Archetypes.

 

Transcript of the Interview with Vila Loukas

27/April/2021

I’m Greek,

I’m immediately predisposed to the world of archetypes.

coming from that world of Greek mythology, all those standardised patterns and ways of operating,

 

I have been working in the world of the healing arts for the last 20 years, and I’m also a Mama of two amazing little people,  those two things have really shaped me significantly.

 

I’m one of those who’s always been seeking,

I’ve always been searching and learning and wanting to understand more,

 

I came to the world of archetypes really early on, as I started to understand through my own journey of self healing and self discovery, the power of how archetypes can serve us and then specifically in the realm of education, in the realm of how we can extend ourselves, how we can help shape ourselves through the work of archetypes,

 

I’ve started in the realm of education, I worked in higher education for about 10 years,

I thought I was on a fast track to a PhD I was going to be a professor at a University, high education, and lo and behold, series of interesting unfoldings, and here I am as a guide in the mystery school, which is higher education,  just in different kind of way.

 

the really amazing thing about archetypes is, they are within us, they are embedded within us.

 

what is an archetype,

it’s a pattern or it’s a blueprint,

or something to follow and take place.

 

most people have heard of the realm of archetypes from literature, for example whether it is mythology or studying “the power of myth” by Joseph Campbell,

where you start to tease apart the archetypes,

 

we find them in stories, the archetype of the hero, the archetype of the villain, the archetype of the King, the Queen, the benevolent ruler, the Joker,

all these character types in a story are really archetypes, they represent a particular pattern or blueprint, a makeup of an expression, specifically of how we can be living our lives.

 

there’s a lot of lot of different complexities in the world of archetypes, but that’s the simplest way to understand how it relates to us as humans living our lives,

 

our modern entertainment industry is completely built on this,

what makes a good film, the Storey shows, the character development,  shows the journey of that archetypal principle through that character,  in the archetypes are represented there through that journey of transformation, into resolution into something higher into something better into something more integrity or truer to what that character is really about.

 

 

how important are archetypes for us growing up?

absolutely essential,

they are everywhere, they’re so apart of our understanding of the world,

we don’t even realise that we’re operating in the world of archetypes all the time,

 

one of my favourite things long before I came to the mystery school is to help educate people in the realm of archetypes, and start to understand what are the archetypes that I sort of default to, my typical kind of archetypes,

 

I’m a teacher so I often embody that archetype of a teacher,

want to help people understand things, want to have it explained to them, this natural tendency to follow those standard ways of operating.

I’m also a mom, I can’t say that I was fully in the mom archetype before I became a mom, but as I had children and I learned to work with the power of that archetype,

 

the mother archetype is one of the most powerful archetypes that exists, within that there’s lots of different kinds of sub- categories, the abundant mother, the great big Mama earth kind of mother,  the overbearing mother, the difficult mother, or the calculating mother… all these different sub archetypes within the general realm of 1.

 

we can choose how we want to express ourselves in our day to day lives through these archetypes.

 

I have a programme that I take people through, where we would identify what are my typical archetypes that I normally hang out in, I find people have about 3 that are their go to, then we play around with trying on different archetypes,

 

what do you want to take on that maybe feels like a bit of a stretch,

what do you take on it’s kind of scary to step into, but you feel like it is an important part of who you really are,

 

we would play around with stepping into those and practising, we do scenarios,

try out what would it be like to walk into the room as the Queen versus walking into the room as the secretary, as the Joker

 

when you come in and apply one particular archetype to a scenario, it changes everything else around it,

they work like formulas, they play off of each other, when you have the archetype of the Queen show up, all the other archetypes are going to respond accordingly.

 

DK:
In MMS, we have a path of initiation we worked with gods goddesses, can you share about working with archetype from a magical perspective?

 

in the mystery school tradition, we do work a lot with gods and goddesses who are our archetypes,

goddess ISIS is a particular archetype, there’s a lot that’s contained within the archetype of goddess ISIS, she’s a magician, a mother, an amazing alchemist, a devoted lover, an amazing partner, mistress of the moon…

 

when we engage with a being who is that archetype, for real, meaning the presence of the energy of that archetype for us to access and engage,

it helps ignite and strengthen those archetypal principles within us,

 

if I’m doing a particular kind of healing, or I’m working in a particular way, where having the support of the archetype of the goddess ISIS helps in a particular way, then calling in that energy, which is the tools from the mystery school in the initiation is allow us to do,

 

we can bring those energies forward, and be the physical expression of that archetypal principle, that God or goddess that is here with us.

 

we get to work in conjunction with them in a really beautiful & amazing way, that benefits not only people we are serving if we’re serving in the form of healer teacher or something like this, but also for us.

we get to have the alchemy, the growth in the development, because we rise to a higher frequency through working with these archetypes.

 

DK: it’s pretty special when you start breaking that down and having that access to such magic in such power through these archetypes…

 

can you tell us a little bit about the Greek archetypes,

Why they were so important and why they’re so popular?

 

VL:

part of what is so true in the world of archetypes is that, they live within the psyche, they live within us, our entire understanding of physical reality is built with these archetypal principles.

 

the Greeks did an amazing job of honing in on what are those archetypes, and how can we work with them such that they’re going to give us greater capacity or what what we’re trying to do in our lives,

 

back in ancient times, the religion was also based on working with these gods and goddesses, and they had such a tradition with it, they had built it up overtime,

 

so when they would invoke these gods and goddess, when they would work with these archetypes, really amazing things would happen,

 

it’s like when you think about the energetic impact, it’s like how deep of a chisel, how deep and how far can that chisel hit through, cut through, that’s kind of how these archetypes work, when you’re looking at energetic impact, it’s got that edge, its impactful.

because of how precise it is, and how strong and how built up it is overtime,

 

 

the ancient Greek archetypes have been used in Storey and myths, it’s about us understanding ourselves.

 

it’s about us understanding the psychology of what it means to be human, and how these different archetypal principles interact,

 

in the mystery school tradition, we work a lot with the universal Kabbalah and the tree of life, that’s one way of really understanding how these different archetypes, they’re all there, they are all present for us,

 

then we start to understand the relationships between them, that’s what the Greek myths and storeys really were teasing out.

 

The Olympian gods and goddess,

King of the gods we have the God Zeus, who in his Roman counterpart and from astrology is Jupiter, that energy is that benevolent ruler, the strong masculine, the one that’s looking over at all, the Thunder God he’s got the lightning, and you don’t want to mess with that guy, and at the same time he’s the one bestowing the blessings and keeping that oversight,

 

at the same time there are these amazing storeys about how Zeus and his two brothers, Poseidon and Hades,

Zeus is the God of the Sky, the King of the gods,

his brother Poseidon is the God of the Seas, he corresponds to Neptune in the Roman tradition

Hades is their third brother, the God of the underworld,

 

there you’ve got these three, the Sky, the sea and the underworld,

and so there are these three regions of reality, these three brothers that are the core group of the gods represent,

 

the three sisters that also are part of this the group of siblings,

the eldest of all the siblings is the goddess Hestia, and she’s perhaps least well known of the whole crew, because she’s a little bit subdued, she’s the goddess of the hearth, who keeps the hearth fires burning, so she’s understood to be the goddess of home and family,

because every home has a hearth fire in order to survive,

 

she also is the only goddess from the entire pantheon that is allowed to be present in the temples of other gods and goddesses,

 

the temple of Zeus is also going to have hestia present, because it’s gonna be a hearth burning in that in that temple, so she’s kind of special in that way,

 

the next sister is hara, who became the consort the wife of Zeus, and allsorts of really interesting storeys about hara and what she’s about,  but generally she is considered a Sky goddess,  also the goddess of marriage and family,

 

the third sister is the goddess Demeter the earth goddess, she is about grain an agriculture and the abundance of the earth,

her daughter is Persephone, the amazing Storey of the descent and the return of Persephone, the cycle of the seasons, return of spring in the end, every year this magical process,

the Demeter Persephone world is also what the elusive mysteries ancient mystery tradition in Greece were based on.

 

those are the six core Olympian gods and goddesses.

 

then we have goddess Aphrodite who is one of the daughters of Zeus,

Athena is another daughter of Zeus she’s a goddess of wisdom and strategy,

then we have the Twins Artemis and Apollo who often represents the sun and the moon they are also children of Zeus,

 

Dionysus is another son of Zeus, he’s the God of  wine and revelry, he’s an earth God, about fertility, when we do celebrations of like Green Man for example you in our wiccan tradition, we were working with a Dionysus- like archetype.

 

DK:

the magic …look at those patterns they represent,

it’s a Storey, interesting, feel tangible, all the relationships between them…  I can’t imagine a better way to start working on ourselves, especially as children, children would love this.

 

VL:

they do.

 

I started working on myself in this path of know they self at the same time of becoming a mom,

five years down I was coming into the work of Kabbalah, I was like how can we helpe the kids get this from the beginning, it’s great to educate adults, to have the opportunity to learn and shifting grow,

 

but kids are doing that already, what if we gave them patterns that they can work with, that are productive and they can start engaging these from early on.

 

so I developed a curriculum for children to be working with gods and goddesses, started with girls doing a goddess circle,

 

part of how I came to my own process of discovering myself was when I was at a really low point in my 20s, depressed and sick in Graduate School almost died, it was working with goddess archetypes that pulled me out, because I would look at set of cards,

 

it depicts those archetypal principles in the form of art, to show, and to speak to these levels of ourselves, it speaks beyond the mental, it goes into the subconscious mind, it goes in to the soul level, it speaks to that part of us,

 

I would see this beautiful depiction of Artemis, this strong warrior goddess who’s out there with her beau under the moon, engaging with the animals, and I was like yes there’s a part of me that’s like that,

 

where I’d see the goddess Lockshme, in all of her abundance and beauty, Sari, outfit & jewellery and I went yes there’s a part of me that’s that too,

 

I start to work on me in such a way to express that a little bit more,

 

 

this is what I wanted to help give to these girls, introduce to them these archetypes early, so that when they come to a challenge, peer pressure or just self-doubt, the teens difficult time understanding who they are in the context of the world.

 

how cool to have a whole set of archetypes that they can just draw on and be like, I know what Goddess durga is about, I’m going to bring some of her in right now,

and not only do I know what she’s about, but I know how to connect in with her.

 

 

DK:

with social media, young girls and young boys, how they viewing themselves doesn’t seem to be a positive experience in most cases,

because the images that are being flooded on all of the different platforms,

it’s not real it’s not real life

 

with these archetypes, it’s drawing on the strengths,

 

VL:

how the world of social media and the screens has flooded our visual intake, also our processing in the mind,

we’re constantly processing so much input, there’s not much space for what might come from the inside out,

what might come from a different place, that back brain, that instinctual place, that soul levels, heart level…  coming in from higher self,

 

sometimes I feel,

with social media what we’re really calling for is a deeper connexion to these archetypal principles,

 

we’re looking to plug in at a deeper level, and that’s what the archetypes allow us to do.

 

it’s kind of a conundrum, because it’s like by flooding ourselves in this world of social media, we’re kind of wiping out the possibility of getting that plug in.

 

but that’s really exactly what we’re seeking.

 

how to really shift the playing field, so we can engage with what is really gonna do we’re searching for, which is to understand that connexion point at a much true or deeper level, which is what the archetypes really give us.

 

DK:

from a perspective of a mother young girl young boy teenager young woman young man, have you got one or two top ticks that you can share with how to connect with archetype?

 

or where to find an archetype, or is something that you can give them a practical

 

VL:

they love magic, it’s such a time they’re seeking that,

to give them magical interfaces,  think cards are great,

Oracle deck, the goddess Oracle,  beautiful images beautiful pictures and storeys,

 

it does exactly that, it gives the pictures which is the 1st input,  when you are drawn to the image,  it speaks at that level,  and then you can dive into the Storey, and you can dive into the deeper understanding,

 

books, beautiful mythology books or specifically gods and goddesses, that just focuses on the archetypes themselves,

 

a young one will pick that up at a time of I don’t feel really great, it starts to work on them and work with them in a way that they won’t even be able to put into words,

 

it works at that that deeper level and can really shift how they’re feeling and give them hope and give them strength because they’re seeing how these archetypes play out, seeing these expressions that they recognise at some level within themselves,

and feel like go yeah that’s something that I too can reach for, and make happen for in my life too.