Faust: The Fool’s Journey
I told you in my last article that I’ll leave literary approaches of the shadow archetype to future articles and I mentioned Goethe’s Faust. I’ll present the shadow in an unusual way, using to the journey of The Fool, one of the Major Arcana trumps from Tarot. We’ll see Faust’s journey, from start until the end and the special connection he has to another trump, namely The Devil, that in the German poem is played by Mephistopheles.
Faust is presented as a character who studies his entire life to obtain supreme knowledge and in the pursuit of happiness. He is like The Fool, the card that is assigned the number 0, Faust is at the start of his journey to finding or recognizing his true moral nature. It is what Jung would call an individuation journey to the Self archetype; I elaborated on this in my previous article. We see in the poem that this journey is composed by all the adventures Faust has with Mephisto’s help. In Faust we find the most atypical image of the shadow archetype. His shadow is not a physical double and not an image of mental illness, he is a demon that takes the hero on a series of journeys where he shows him, through a variety of demonic scenarios, his true inner self and where Faust finds the knowledge that he searched all his life by studying. Mephifsto merely showed him the way, Faust had to decipher all that he saw.
