“Archetypes are like riverbeds which dry up when the water deserts them”

Carl Gustav Jung’s riverbed image makes the archetype neither a vanished relic nor a consciously chosen belief: it is a latent pattern that may become active again. The book uses the metaphor to connect contemporary heathen revival with Jung’s account of Wotan’s return, while presenting that account as Jung’s interpretation rather than an established explanation of history.

The Riverbed Image

Jung’s formulation is: “ARCHETYPES ARE LIKE RIVERBEDS WHICH DRY UP WHEN THE WATER DESERTS THEM, BUT WHICH IT CAN FIND AGAIN AT ANY TIME.” The comparison turns absence into dormancy. A dry riverbed remains a formed channel, and water may find it again; likewise, an archetype can lose its apparent cultural force without being erased. Its return need not begin with a deliberate effort to reconstruct an older worldview.

The image gives the idea of atavism a psychological rather than merely biological resonance. The surrounding text defines atavism as the reappearance of ancestral characteristics or a reversion to an earlier type, then places Jung’s saying beside that definition. Together, they suggest a past that can recur in the present—not as a simple restoration of old customs, but as the renewed activity of an inherited pattern.

From Religious Revival to Possession

The discussion begins with contemporary attempts to revive pre-Christian religions, noting that the appeal of heathen religion may be instinctual and that northern gods can stir unexpectedly among descendants of their former worshippers. Jung’s metaphor helps explain the distinction the passage draws between consciously seeking a pre-Christian worldview and being involuntarily gripped by its archetypes. In this account, revival can be experienced as something that happens to people, not only something they set out to create.

The book then applies that possibility to Jung’s 1936 essay “Wotan,” published in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau. Jung argued that the Nazi movement resulted from a large-scale “possession” by Wotan. He traced elements of heathen revival through German writers, especially Nietzsche, whom he considered seized by Wotan and transmitters of aspects of the god’s archetypal nature. The riverbed metaphor supplies the underlying logic: a long-quiescent pattern may become active again, even in a society that believes it has outgrown the past.

The Metaphor’s Historical Reach

Jung described Wotan as an old god of storm and frenzy who had awakened in a country thought to have left the Middle Ages behind. The contrast between presumed modernity and a supposedly dormant ancient force gives the metaphor its unsettling historical charge. The riverbed is not proof of Jung’s explanation; it is an image through which the book presents his claim that modern political life could be shaped by archaic religious patterns.

The passage also records Jung’s prediction that Germany, then under what he saw as Wotan’s more furious attributes, might later manifest other, more ecstatic and mantic aspects of the archetype. The image therefore implies recurrence without making every return identical: the channel may be found again, but the form its force takes can change. That tension—continuity beneath apparent disappearance, variation at the moment of return—is the expression’s central significance in the discussion.