February 24, 2022

From Dr. Ayana Jamieson, depth psychologist and faculty member at The Salome Institute. Her seminar and book club, The Archetype of Change in Speculative Fiction, begins Sunday, March 6th.

An archetype is like the proverbial stone that gets tossed into a pool of water. It’s the central force that embodies all those ripples outward that go on, and on, and on. You can see the ripples but you can’t hold onto them or make them static. There is no such thing as an archetype in and of itself. We can see the patterns and costumes that are forms, manifestations of an archetypal pattern, but the stone itself has already drifted down, down and away, and joined the bedrock, flotsam, and silt of the body of water ready to nourish some future organism.

I believe that Octavia E. Butler seeded the archetype of Change into her writing so that we could try on different ways of being human, being better, and being aware of the changes, positive and negative, that would impact future generations.

All of the books selected for our upcoming book club feature moments of upheaval and dramatic shifts from the ways things were to how things are going to be.

In the seminar, beginning next week on Sunday, March 6th, we will start with Butler’s Wild Seed. Then in April, we’ll read N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season before exploring Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Son of the Storm in May. All of these stories are speculative fiction—a field that is wide open and only restricted by our imaginations.

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for all kinds of beloved categories: Superhero fiction, alternative histories, alternative futures, fantasy, science fiction, horror, or other narratives that extrapolate beyond the known world.

We know that this is a transitional time when we need lessons about this era of rupture and how things will transition to whatever comes next.

We need to learn to read the signs of emergent story patterns that offer lessons for survival while in community with others. The conquering hero, the single individual moving through the story cannot succeed without learning from and through those around him. I hope, in conversation with each other and with these authors, we can begin to speculate beyond the Hero’s Journey monomyth in favor of some of the other story patterns that exist in human cultures as interconnected rather than conquering.

Last year on Feb 18, 2021, the NPR podcast Throughline aired an episode, “How Octavia Butler's Sci-Fi Dystopia Became A Constant In A Man's Evolution.” It was a sweet synchronicity that my interview with them had been recorded December 17, 2020, the day of my first Salome Institute talk, “The Mythology and Depth Psychology of Octavia E. Butler.”

My evening with Satya and Kelley and our guests was a continuation of this recorded interview. NPR interspersed Butler’s own words via archival recordings with interviews between hosts, producers, and writers adrienne maree brown, Nnedi Okorafor, and me!

You can read a transcript of that talk or listen to the program here.

~Dr. Ayana Jamieson