From Cliche to Archetype 313 programming. The truth of the programming depends on how the person who consults the Book of Changes responds to its messages. Introduction Between the ancient and the modern worlds there has been a kind of reversal of roles for cliché and archetype. The inventor, the discoverer of new forms and new technologies, was for archaic man someone who was more than a man. “Surely some power more than human gave things their first names,” says Socrates in the Phaedrus. A modern Eskimo said to Professor E.S.Carpenter, “How could I know stone if there were no word ‘stone’?” To archaic man language is an immediate evoker of reality, a magical form. In the same way, he thinks of the “apple of his eye” as constituting his visual world, not as receiving it. The idea of words as merely corresponding to reality, the idea of matching, is characteristic only of highly literal cultures in which the visual sense is dominant. Today in the age of quantum mechanics, for which the “chemical bond” is, according to Heisenberg and Linus Pauling and others, a “resonance,” it is perfectly natural to resume a “magical” attitude to language. The poetry of statement became the crux of one of the great critical upheavals of the twentieth century. This change corresponds to the discovery that consciousness is also a multileveled event with its roots in the “deepest terrors and desires.” It might be argued that a main cause of the merging of the archaic attitude to cliché with the modern notion of archetype as a more intense reality resulted from our great variety of new techniques of retrieval. Both past cultures and primal individual experiences are now subject to ready and speedy access. The ancient world had fewer means and fewer motives for retrieving the past just in the degree to which it considered all past events as present. The medieval need for the retrieval of ancient Greek and Latin and Hebrew for scriptural study began a cult of historical scholarship under modest conditons of manuscript culture. Today the means of retrieval of historical cultures and events is so extensive that it involves our time in depth in ancient cults and mysteries. As we meditate upon the ancient clichés or sacro-breakthroughs, the literal man is inclined to consider them as “archetypes.” For example, Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism defines archetype as “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole.” Of course this particular definition is most unJungian in suggesting that archetypes are human artifacts produced by much repetition—in other words, a form of cliché. For the literary archetypalist there is always a problem of whether Oedipus Rex or Tom Jones would have the same effect on an audience in the South Sea Islands as in Toronto. With the new