Archetype of the Spirit: Origins of Spirituality-Individual and Collective
Peter Tufts Richardson
Red Barn Publishing, Rockland, Maine, 2007
Peter Richardson, with Archetype of the Spirit, proposes a structure for understanding the entire history of human consciousness and spiritual development, a structure underlying all the great spiritual traditions. In his earlier book (1996), Four Spiritualities: Expressions of Self, Expressions of Spirit: A Psychology of Contemporary Spiritual Choice, he described four basic ways in which human beings express their spirituality, based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality model and C.G. Jung's psychological work. Here he broadens out that basic structure and looks to the world's religions for its symbolic and historical expressions.
This is a rich, dense and layered read which will reward the reader's attention to Richardson's careful weaving of concepts at several levels. The charts and diagrams are very helpful to this end, especially for the visual learner who wants to "see" the relationships among complex ideas. Familiarity with Four Spiritualities, or at least with the Myers-Briggs model, will be helpful in the early chapters. But Richardson gives a good overview of his four spiritual "types" in chapter three for the uninitiated, and a working pre-knowledge of Myers-Briggs is less necessary in the later chapters.
Richardson's Mandala of Four Spiritualities shows how each Myers-Briggs functional "type" is aligned with a particular form of spirituality individually and historically. He says the book's purpose is "to document and show the dynamics of this Mandala as an archetype of human spiritual origins." And so he does, tracing the history of human spiritual development and addressing Earth/Sky and Sun/Moon polarities, parallels between the human bodily form (e.g., chakras) and the symbols of the World Tree and the caduceus, and what he calls "spiritual poise"-balance or spiritual maturity. These symbols are brought to life by photographs of religious/spiritual artifacts and symbols from around the world.
For spiritual directors, this book can serve as a resource for understanding directees' perspectives, struggles, and satisfaction-as well as one's own. His thoughts about the individual's development of meditative practice, and the spiritual director's role, will be helpful. I found Richardson's meditations at the end, on earth, sky, sun, moon, and tree, a wonderful rounding out. This is a good resource for spiritual directors, and for anyone who loves the intricacies of human spiritual life as it unfolds for the person and in history, and loves a way to understand its manifold expressions.