The validity and universality of archetypes, paradigms or patterns, as well as their usage and application in all facets of human life, are possible because human nature is always the same. It does not change in time or space, that is, it turns out to be the same in all generations, from Adam to our present day, and even to the end of time, and the same in all places on the planet, in all cultures and civilizations that have existed, exist or will exist.
We do not see in the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt, in their passage through the desert and entry into the Promised Land, only one historical and theological reality but also the three stages of the archetype of progress in all its aspects – scientific, social, psychological, spiritual etc. – so that the reading of the biblical account appeals to our collective unconsciousness where, according to Jung, all archetypes are stored, which has the immaterial heritage of humanity and part of the cultural consciousness of the West.
The reading and analysis of this biblical account, beyond its historical and theological significance, can serve us as a guide and inspiration in other facets of human life that imply change, transcription, conversion, passage from one reality to another, growth and progress. Michael Walzer in his book, Exodus and Revolution, tells us that an exodus is a model or story that makes it possible to narrate other stories.
To be born and to die in light of the archetype
In light of this archetype, one of the events may be the process of our birth: we are confined in a very small place in our mother’s womb, attached to her like a patient to a life support system, without great freedom of movement and little space to grow. The passage of this type of “Egypt” into the Promised Land of freedom, the coming to light, is a process or passage that may be quick or take some time, but in both cases very painful and uncomfortable, both for the baby and for the mother.
If the entry into this world can be read in light of the archetype Egypt – Desert – Promised Land, then its departure can also be read in light of this same archetype. Towards the end of our lives, whether by old age or sickness and the suffering that it causes us, life itself becomes an unbearable Egypt.
We begin by having limitations in all kinds of things, we cannot eat this or that, cannot walk, become bedridden and finally, many are attached once again to an umbilical cord, that is, to a life support system that artificially does what some of our organs can no longer do naturally. Our life becomes an Egypt from which we want to free ourselves.
But to move on to the true Promised Land, the eternal life, we have to pass through the desert which is the process of death or birth into the eternal life. A process that is also painful, both for the one who experiences it and for those who are bound to the dying person by ties of affection.
When my late mother was in agony in the process of passing away, my father who was assisting her asked: “Do you want me to bring you the medicine?” – “No, I want to die.” And these were her last words. Faced with the hardship of the desert, but hopeful of the Promised Land of eternal life, my mother did not want to return to a life already full of limitations. Like she used to say, “I have already so many health issues, so many limitations and illnesses.”
The basic archetype of human life
“No pain, no gain” says the proverb. Once exiled from the earthly paradise, Adam and Eve know that this proverb, consciously or unconsciously inspired by the archetype, takes place in all aspects and strands of life and is already in itself one of the most important archetypes of human life.
We take as an example a young person who wants to become a doctor. Wanting to be a doctor is his vocation, his Promised Land; not being a doctor yet is his Egypt, because his true self at the moment does not coincide with what he ought to be, with what is in his being because he is not yet who he wants to be. In some way he has to stop being who he is and enter into a process that will take him to become a doctor: this process is the university attendance, to study every day.
Nobody lives in the desert; it is always a passing land. In the same way, no one is a student forever, being an applied student is a matter that lasts 7 or 8 years of his life, but which are indispensable for the acquisition of the degree that allows him to practice medicine.
In order to cross the desert, the Spanish people has two proverbs that advise us of the attitude to have towards the hardship of the desert. “Put on a good face in bad time”, although it refers to the weather, but it might as well apply to the difficulties that arise in our lives. In face of these, we must have a positive attitude, optimistic and not pessimistic or fatalistic.
“Take the bull by its horns” advises us that in face of difficulties, not to hide our heads in the sand, as they say ostriches do, an act that shows the common attitude of denial, not even to try to get around or escape difficulties, but to face them head on with a brave heart, with the willpower of a warrior, of a hero.
The very journey of the people from a past of slavery to a present of harsh penances and sacrifices, setting the sight on a bright, idyllic and utopian future, is an image of this archetype. The German Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch based his principle of hope on Exodus.
This also inspired the black preachers of the sixties, such as Martin Luther King, as well as the political theology of Johann Baptist Metz, the theology of hope of Jürgen Moltmann, and lastly, the heir of these two, the Latin-American liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Leonardo Boff and others.
History archetype
The Exodus constitutes the time of modern history, which no longer obeys cycles or myths but is an arrow travelling from the past towards the future. The time of history is a time where the past, the present and the future meet and dialogue with one another. The new is built upon what we have learned from past mistakes, and therefore not to remember the past is to be doomed to repeat it unconsciously, uncritically, indefinitely.
In keeping alive the memory of enslavement in Egypt prevents the same mistakes from being made. This is what the prophets did and what the apostles also did in their first evangelization discourses: to read the past in the present in order to guide and project the future.
Indeed, life itself is a pilgrimage as Hebrews (13:14) says – for here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come, and any concrete historical achievement of this is always only an image of the one that is always to come, and that is eternal life, because only in it do milk and honey flow unceasingly.
It sounds like the myth of the eternal return, but the same history tells us that concrete and historical realization of utopia, of the Promised Land, easily transforms itself over time into an Egypt from which it is necessary to leave again, repeating the experience of the desert. The true homeland and the end of all progress is life in God and with God.
Linear and cyclic conception of time
Cosmic time, the Circle – Starting from the objectively observable, the circular understanding of time has always prevailed in ancient Greece and the Far East. From the cosmic point of view, the 365 days that the earth takes to go around the sun, from the point of view of Nature, or more specifically from the changes in climate, the four seasons spring, summer, autumn and winter. From these facts, the myth of the “eternal return” was born to Philosophy, the idea that “there is nothing new under the sun” to Science, and the belief in “reincarnation” to Religion.
Human time, the Straight Line – From an existential and human point of view, each day that passes is one more day that we are going to live through and one less day that we have left to live. To conceive time as a straight line, which comes from the past, passes through the present and moves towards the future, is not something that can be observed in Nature.
Time in a straight line is the time of individual and community history, the time that integrates the idea of moral progress: today was better than yesterday, tomorrow will be better than today. In Philosophy, the Heraclitus’ saying that “we do not bathe twice in the waters of the same river” shares this understanding of time, and the same is true in Cosmology and Religion that convey the notions of the beginning and the end of the world.
This is also the Jewish conception of time: the departure from Egypt (land of slavery), the passage through the desert (land of suffering, penance, purification and effort) and the entry into the Promised Land, where milk and honey flow abundantly (land of freedom, rewarded effort and finished work).
Liberation, one social and one individual
Although the archetype, as we have said, can be applied to all kinds of evolution, progress, liberation, change or conversion, in this article we will study the biblical narrative of the epic of the Jewish people, from Egypt to the Promised Land, taking it as an archetype and therefore, as a guide and inspiration of two types of freedom: one social and the other individual.
For the social liberation, we chose Karl Marx’s theory, his historical and dialectical materialism applied to the analysis of a capitalist society and the offer of socialism as a solution to the problems of capitalism. In this sense, capitalism is the Egypt, the desert would be the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Promised Land the classless society of socialism.
For the individual liberation, we chose the process the individual must follow to be free of any addictive behaviour, be it caused by a substance like drug, alcohol, tobacco, money or a repetitive and obsessive behaviour like sex, anger etc. The Egypt would be the addictive behaviour that keeps the individual deprived of his freedom, the desert would be the time of purification, detoxification and strengthening of the ego, and the Promised Land would be the regaining of freedom from the addictive behaviour.
EGYPT
Become aware that you are a slave
In the Bible, Egypt means knowledge and the love of knowledge. Egypt is, therefore, a place where you learn the truth. While Joseph ruled Egypt, it was a paradise for him, and his brothers and father. Psychologically, this means that while the mind dominates or governs the world, much can be learned. However, a pharaoh who had not known Joseph and the children of Israel, that is, the dominion of the mind over the physical world, began to reign in Egypt. The pharaoh represents the dominion of the physical world over the mind, or the dominion of the flesh over the spirit, as St. Paul puts it.
While the spirit or the mind has primacy or governs the body, its desires and appetites, the human being enjoys freedom because he is above all, a spiritual being. When, on other hand, the pharaoh rises to the throne, that is, the body with its desires dominate the mind and the spirit, the human being experiences slavery.
Egypt is synonymous with the land of slavery, but also at a later time, it is synonymous with the land of truth. I quote the story I told in the article about the tridimensionality of social action, See – Judge – Act: a Spanish priest with all his European baggage after having contemplated for some time the deplorable and miserable situation in which a community of Latin American peasants lived, asked them, “But are you not hungry and thirsty for justice?” They replied, “What is this hunger and thirst for justice? We, Father, only know the hunger for bread and the thirst for water.”
(Moses) looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, he saw two Hebrews fighting; and he said to the one who was in the wrong, ‘Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?’ He answered, ‘Who made you a ruler and judge over us?’ Exodus 2:12-14
While the peasant only knows the hunger for bread and the thirst for water, he lives in a land of slavery, he is a slave without knowing he is one and, like the Jewish people when they lived enslaved, he does not accept that a Moses should come to speak about hunger and thirst for justice. The Hebrews also did not accept the freedom and struggle for justice that Moses offered.
Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, (…) The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. Exodus 3:7-9
When the people finally opened their eyes to their true condition, then yes, they interpreted their life in another way, they began to be aware of being slaves in a foreign land and began to dream of another life in another land – a land that Jacob’s children had left. Now yes, they are ready to accept a leader to take them out of there, but also this is no longer the same Moses who had killed the Egyptian.
In line with the article “see – judge – act” which, as we have said, in its time was most likely inspired by the Exodus, after the people became aware of their life as slaves, an alternative to this life begins to surge in their minds. This alternative is a dream, a promise, an objective, a utopia situated somewhere in the future that acts like a magnet that draws the people to get out of their situation and walk towards the future where this utopia can become a reality.
Like a GPS, while the satellite does not discover the place that we are, it cannot tell us the route to the place where we want to go. And for those who do not know where to go, there are no favorable winds. The wind, or the driving force, only appears when we know our path, our goal, our utopia. After discovering this, it is time to leave, but before leaving, we celebrate our liberation, because hope will guide us.
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Martin Luther King
Easter, the memorial celebration archetype
Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. (…) You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. (…) This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance. Exodus 12:3, 6, 14
A people who never gathers to celebrate their identity ceases to be a people. On each day of the ordinary time, each person dedicates himself to his task, work, and in this, he can be detached from the rest of his brothers. The whole nation, the entire people, or the whole association of people has days in which to celebrate their national or associative identity; if this ceases to happen, this people, this nation, or this association will cease to exist also.
God who is the creator of human nature knows it much better than humans. Therefore, even before the people left for the desert, he decreed that the same act of departure should be a celebration to be repeated in a ritual each year, so that no one would ever forget the price of freedom, how much this liberation from slavery costed.
Jesus came to bring deliverance to all mankind from all types of “Egypts” that deprive us of our freedom and dignity as children of God. And he also instituted a memorial act – the Eucharist – and explicitly said “do this in memory of me” after blessing the bread and wine that would become his body and blood, the price that he paid for our freedom.
DESERT
After the euphoria of the Passover celebration and the departure from Egypt, difficulties soon started to settle in: at the front appeared the Red Sea and from behind the powerful Egyptian army. The people, caught between the sword and the wall, felt the temptation to look at the dream which until then had led them on as if it were an illusion and a deception, like the mirages that precisely are well known in the desert.
This desperate situation was only one of the many that followed: hunger, thirst, serpents, plus the memory of the meat that they ate in Egypt now seemed like a dream but much more real and viable, because they had already experienced it. All this prevented them from marching forward, it seems now that the utopia has shifted from the future to the past. In the face of the challenges that freedom presented to them, the slavery of Egypt now appeared in their minds as a lost paradise. This explains the temptation to go back.
Freedom as a process
No bread without freedom and no freedom without bread. Bread is the food for the body, while freedom is the food for the soul. It is the soul that distinguishes us from the rest of the living beings. Therefore, the true human value is freedom and not bread, the ability to take our life into our own hands and make something out of it that is more important than life itself. However, to live, that is, to have life in our hands, we need to be alive, that is, we need to feed our body.
It is not edifying to sacrifice freedom to obtain bread, because we sacrifice our reason for life. It is like being humanly dead, like giving up life to be alive. Unless we sacrifice our freedom to get someone’s bread. Moses demanded from the people to temporarily give up bread, abundance of water and meat in exchange for freedom: a greater good than all these.
In assuming a new awareness of oneself, a new identity, to idealize and elaborate the project of a just and fraternal society in a way that freedom is synonymous with participation and responsibility for the project, is a long and tortuous path because the process takes time. In Moses’ case, the shortest and easiest process would be to go through the land of the Philistines, along the Mediterranean Sea.
Desert and detoxification
“We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now.
I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!
And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!” Martin Luther King, the day before his assassination
Freedom is not conquered overnight, in one single act, in one flight. Freedom is a process with ups and downs, it is necessary to free ourselves from old habits, from the onions and the meat of Egypt, to overcome the temptation to turn back that arises when we encounter difficulties on the way; the desert means detoxification from vices and bad habits that enslave us. Cutting ties with the previous life in order to be available for the new one to come.
In the long process of liberation, many fell by the wayside. Moses did not enter into the Promised Land; Luther King who led the black people of the United States to freedom and equality also did not see his dream fulfilled in his short life.
Of those who left Egypt, only Joshua and his friend Caleb entered the Promised Land. They were both positive, always looking forward, were optimistic and did not fear what most feared. Especially in the episode of the spies of the land when fear paralyzed most of Israel’s children but Joshua and Caleb were there to infuse strength, courage, hope and faith in the God who had so often given them proofs of his love and dedication.
One cannot enter the Promised Land with the vices of the past, these have to stay in the desert. This is what probably symbolizes the fact that only two of those who came out of slavery entered the Promised Land, while the others who stayed on the path were succeeded by their children who had been born and raised free in the desert.
The lesson of the butterfly
A man spent hours watching a butterfly struggling to emerge from its cocoon. It managed to make a small hole, but its body was too large to get through it. After a long struggle, it appeared to be exhausted and remained absolutely still. The man decided to help the butterfly and, with a pair of scissors, he cut open the cocoon thus releasing the butterfly. However, the butterfly’s body was very small and wrinkled and its wings were all crumpled.
The man continued to watch, hoping that, at any moment, the butterfly would open its wings and fly away. Nothing happened. In fact, the butterfly spent the rest of its brief life dragging around its shrunken body and shriveled wings, incapable of flight.
What the man, out of kindness and in his eagerness to help, had failed to understand was that the tight cocoon and the efforts that the butterfly had to make in order to squeeze out of that tiny hole were God’s way of training the butterfly and of strengthening its wings.
From outcasts to a people
A common enemy makes of strangers, friends. In the desert, everything is antagonistic and therefore, unity is strength – to survive, everyone’s effort is needed. It is not possible a direct passage from Egypt to the Promised Land, it is the desert that turns a band of outcasts into a people, with its own idiosyncrasy, law, language, way of life, common goal and a special relationship with God who walks with the people in the form of fire during the night and a cloud during the day, and who encamps with them, living in a tent.
This relationship of absolute dependence on God and interdependence on each other is later exalted by prophets as an idyllic time: “Thus says the Lord: I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed me in the wilderness, in a land not sown. Israel was holy to the Lord…” Jeremiah 2:2-3
The desert is not a place to live, it lacks everything, even the essential. Naturally, a person in the desert becomes more spiritual, turns to the inner landscape because there is nothing on the outside that captures his five senses. It is for this reason that for the people, the desert was a time of individual and social introspection and, within themselves, find the One of whom Saint Augustine says God is intimior intimo meo, who is inside of us and beyond our innermost self. In this process of introspection, two birds are killed with one stone: we get to know our very self and we get to know God who is inside of us but beyond our innermost self.
Alliance or pact
The transition from a state of oppression to a state of freedom presupposes an irrevocable change and an oath. During the march in the desert, the Hebrews guided by Moses made a covenant among themselves, as a people and with God. In this way, on Mount Sinai, a group of tribes becomes a people, a nation with laws and a constitution to govern their social life.
The difference from the earlier covenants with Abraham and Noah, which were unilateral and unconditional, is that this covenant with Moses is bilateral, that is, if the people remains faithful, God will keep his side of the oath. Moses gives the people the possibility of a choice.
“(...) this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. (…) the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.
But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. Deuteronomy 30: 11, 14-18
An identical discourse (Deuteronomy 31:1-29) is made by Joshua, Moses’ successor, before the last passage or Passover: that of the desert to the Promised Land by the crossing of the Jordan River. One more time and for the last time before beginning a new life in a new land, the people are reminded of the covenant that they made with God, which constituted them as a people, that is, which gave them an identity so often exalted in confrontation with other neighbouring or distant peoples.
THE PROMISED LAND
After crossing the Jordan River, the people finally reach the Promised Land, but this is not handed over to them with a kiss. It is said that God feeds the birds in the air, but does not bring the food to their nest, they have to go out and get it. It costed much to get to the Promised Land and upon arriving they come across Jericho, the oldest city in the ancient world and well-fortified. They then had to conquer it, like the rest of the land where milk and honey flow.
He went to evangelize and was evangelized
(…) as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them – the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord your God has commanded, so that they may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the Lord your God. Deuteronomy 20:16-18
I do not stop to justify or defend the verse with connotations of genocide, I leave this to the most learned in sacred scriptures. As we are speaking of archetypes, the symbolic meaning of this extermination that God ordered is not so much of the peoples but of the customs of these same peoples so that, as the same text says, it does not happen that the people instead of establishing their culture, idiosyncrasy and faith in the land, were to adopt customs, habits and vices of the peoples who inhabit that same land.
Therefore, it refers to a cultural cleansing, the kind of cleansing that Jesus did in the Temple of Jerusalem so that it would no longer be a place of business and idolatry, but a place of prayer and worship to the one God, the One who had taken the people out of Egypt and accompanied them all the way there, giving them this land. How many times we go to evangelize to bring others to our faith, our cause and end up being the ones conquered to their faith and their cause.
The fact that Joshua and his people did not obey God and did not exterminate all Canaanites including the women and children, does not mean that they were morally superior to God himself but rather that they did precisely what God feared: being the invaders, they let themselves be invaded and contaminated by the customs of the Canaanites and since they were no longer nomads, they also began to worship the gods of the sedentary peoples.
The Promised Land is the Kingdom of God
More than a concrete place, the Promised Land is individually a way of being who we are and the role we play in the world. We are in the world, but we are not of the world. The history of salvation began with Abraham, a wandering Aramean who left his land. Even before him, Yahweh did not hide his preference for nomadism over sedentarism. Without any reason other than this, he accepted the sacrifice of Abel who was a shepherd and therefore a nomad, and not that of Cain who was a farmer and therefore sedentary.
For this same reason, as we have seen before, the prophets exalt the time when the people walked through the desert, and condemn the sedentary lifestyle that leads to idolatry. God Yahweh is a god of nomads and not a sedentary god. The sedentary gods were gods of fertility, of agriculture. Sedentarism, to halt, goes against cosmic and human nature, because everything moves, we too have to be always on the move for when we stop and lower our guards, we easily become prey to idolatry. To be in the world without being of the world is an expression of a certain spiritual nomadism that we must maintain.
On the other hand, at the social level, we live committed to a project for a better world which is the Kingdom of God, but we never fully identify with any conquest, even in this sense.
The Kingdom is already among us since God through his Son (historically, Jesus of Nazareth) entered into human history. But the Kingdom is not among us in its fullness because the world can always be better. We know that it will never be like Heaven, the Kingdom of God par excellence. That is why we live committed, but not implicated or completely identified with the historical achievements of the Kingdom of God.
The Promised Land is not, therefore, a concrete geographic place but a society where justice and peace reign. And for it to reign, continuous efforts and constant vigilance are needed so that it does not descend into injustice and violence.
As we have seen, the Egypt of Joseph’s time was similar to the Promised Land, because Jacob’s children took refuge there with their father so that they would not die of starvation. During the time of Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus, it became again a land of salvation, because it was there that the child Jesus took refuge until the death of Herod.
We can conclude that each Promised Land was once an Egypt and each Egypt can be a Promised Land. As Christians, we must live in the desert, always leaving Egypt and walking towards the Promised Land; today better than yesterday and tomorrow better than today.
The use of the archetype in Karl Marx’s communist theory
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German economist and philosopher of Jewish descent who lived in a time when the first social revolution emptied the countryside and filled cities with workers, including children, who lived in subhuman conditions, with too many hours of work, low wages, and in extreme poverty.
Capitalism is the Egypt of the proletariat
For Marx, society was divided into the proletarians, the new slaves, and the bourgeois, the new lords. He then applied this reading of the society of his time to the rest of history, which he saw as a class struggle in which the oppressed fight against their oppressor.
In this society, the capitalist bourgeoisie controlled the production process, whereby a factory’s products were sold at a price that included the raw material, labour and a profit from which only the bourgeoisie benefited. Some industrial philanthropists on realizing the exorbitant profits they enjoyed, distributed them to the workers, but most of them became ever richer while the proletarians became impoverished.
Like the Jewish people in their Egypt, Marx who was also a Jew understood that the resentment of the proletariat on seeing the fruit of their sweat stolen would increase until one day when the famous slogan of the communist manifesto of Marx and Engels (1848) would echo in all the factories: “Workers of the world, unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The dictatorship of the proletariat is the desert
With this, Marx understood, the proletarians would leave their Egypt, repudiate their condition as slaves and would take the reins of power and the production process. The roles would be reversed, just as in the parable of the rich man and the poor man Lazarus. (Luke 16:19-31)
These were the times of the communist revolution, difficult times for all, especially for the bourgeois who were expropriated from their power, property, and place and role they played in society. Their functions disappeared, their class disappeared.
Despite being an atheist, Marx applied to perfection the matrix of Egypt – Desert – Promised Land, and probably saw himself as the new Moses, who would bring out of slavery the new chosen people, the proletarians of the whole world.
Society without classes is the Promised Land
After the victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and its capitalism, an instrument of oppression, a new society without classes should emerge, governed by Marx’s principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. In this idyllic society, properties, lands, factories, means of production belong to all, are owned by all.
All would have the right and equal access to education, social classes would disappear, thus ending the dictatorship of the proletariat because there would be neither proletarians nor bourgeois, and harmony, justice and peace would reign that would make the state obsolete and eventually disappear.
Hegelian and Marxist dialectics
Most of us know that Marx drank from Hegel or, better said, from an inverted Hegel by his adoption of Feuerbach’s atheism. For the philosopher Hegel, the distinction between matter and spirit was illusory, and he concluded that matter was a form of spirit; Marx, on the other hand, understood that spirit was a form of matter.
If we replace spirit with energy (we can in fact understand spirit as an energy because they are both intangible), today we would say with Einstein that they were both right, matter is a form of energy, just as energy is a form of matter.
As an appendix, I would like to add a mention of the tridimensionality of Hegel’s dialectics, implied in Marx’s socialist theory. For both, history develops in conflicts between opposing forces: Thesis (Egypt), Antithesis (Desert), Synthesis (Promised Land). This applies to the class struggle, as Marx did, to nations, institutions, and so on until, in Hegel’s mind, we reach Heaven or, in Marx’s mind, to the classless society that would be, according to him, the end of history.
The use of the archetype in all sorts of fight against any form of addiction, bad habit or vice
Egypt – Desert – Promised Land is not only an archetype of social change but also an archetype of individual change, of conversion, of leaving behind some obsessive, compulsive, repetitive, neurotic behaviour that gives us the impression that we are living on autopilot and not on manual, of not being in command of our own lives and of being slaves to vices or bad habits, whether be in attitudes or in substances.
Time is late and we have no space here to develop the subject the way it deserves. In the course of our lives, we have fallen into situations of Egypt and lost our freedom before others, as in the case of domestic violence, through obsessive, compulsive and repetitive behaviours in the field of anger, sex and in many other fields. In the same way, we also lose our freedom when we become addicted to substances that end up playing a psychological or existential role in our lives.
Although traditionally used by the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), the 12-Step program constitutes the main theory for dealing with all kinds of addiction, whether psychological or substance in nature. In our opinion, this theory also obeys the archetype and was drawn consciously or unconsciously on the basis of this paradigm that we have described.
The Egypt – Admitting that we have lost control of ourselves
This is the first step. While the Israelites did not realize that they were slaves under Pharaoh, the thirst for change to get out of this situation never arose. It is one thing to live in a situation, but another to know, to understand and to interpret that situation. Many addicts don’t see their situation as such; many smokers say that they can quit any time if they wanted to; one of them was heard to say anecdotally that it was easy to quit as he had done it 20 times already…
The Desert – Purification, detoxification, abstinence syndrome
The outcasts of Egypt had to constitute themselves as a people in order to survive together the hardships of the desert. The alcoholics anonymous are a community that comes together to fight an evil. Among the 12 Steps, some refer to this relationship that is established with others and with the Other, God.
The desert for the addicts is a place of detoxification. A liver takes time to detox, while the lungs can retain the accumulated pollutants for a long time. During this time of detoxification when the body starts to crave for the substance, the spirit while starving in the desert remembers the pots full of meat left behind in Egypt. The abstinence syndrome is the temptation to turn around and go back.
The Promised Land – Liberation, harmony, peace with oneself and with others
Finally, we arrive at the Promised Land, where we are once again masters of our destiny, where once again we have and can exercise control over our behaviour. According to the 12-Step theory, it is time to reconcile with those we have hurt when we were not ourselves and were possessed by the substances and behaviours that we can mystically understand as impure spirits. Once these spirits are cast out, we are free again and can relate in peace and harmony with ourselves and with others.
CONCLUSION
Both the individual change or conversion in the face of sin or vice, as well as the social revolution or evolution effort towards a society of justice and peace, follow this archetype.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC