The concept of Archetypal Ordering Factors occupies a pivotal position in depth-psychological theory, designating those transpersonal structures that organize psychic and, by extension, physical reality into coherent patterns prior to and independent of individual will. The corpus reveals several converging lines of inquiry. Jung himself, in his later work, assigned to number a privileged status as the primary archetype of order, a position elaborated with exceptional rigor by Marie-Louise von Franz, who demonstrates that number functions simultaneously as a property of matter and as a pre-conscious organizing principle of the psyche. Hillman, from his archetypal-psychological vantage, identifies the senex principle as the psychic representative of ordering itself—the force that drives complexes toward fixity, law, and ultimate form. A cosmological register appears in Tarnas and Greene, who argue that planetary symmetries constitute objective archetypal ordering factors operative in both interior and historical time. Contemporary neuropsychological approaches, represented by McGovern, reframe these factors as hierarchical prediction cascades across cortical and subcortical systems. The deepest tension in the literature runs between those who treat archetypal ordering factors as purely psychic dominants and those—following Jung’s synchronicity hypothesis and the physicist Pauli—who regard them as governing the interface of psyche and matter alike, making them genuinely cosmological rather than merely psychological categories.
whenever the emphasis of the tale is on establishing an orientation, or an order, there are four creators: the four pillars of the world, the four directions of heaven… we have the archetypal pattern upon
Von Franz argues that quaternary groupings in creation myths embody an archetypal ordering principle distinct from triadic creative-flow patterns, grounding the four psychological functions in a cosmogonic archetype of ordered totality.
, Creation Myths, 1995thesis
The archetypes of the collective unconscious are ordered successively in time in accordance with certain temporal relationships. There are certain sequences
Von Franz posits that archetypes function as temporal ordering factors, a claim she supports by linking number to cross-cultural mythological time-units and calendrical systems.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
We must regard them as creative acts, as continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.
Von Franz, following Jung, characterizes psychic ordering patterns as acausal yet structurally invariant creative acts, thereby establishing archetypal ordering factors as neither mechanically causal nor historically contingent.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
Jung, in his old age, turned particularly to number as ‘the archetype of order’… von Franz in her Number and Time where we find many images and concepts, and concerns, of senex consciousness.
Hillman identifies Jung’s late turn to number as the archetype of order and links it phenomenologically to senex consciousness, situating numerical ordering within a specific archetypal complex.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
the senex archetype transcends mere biological senescence and is given from the beginning as a potential of order, meaning, and teleological fulfillment—and death—within all the psyche and all its parts.
Hillman grounds the senex archetype’s ordering function not in biology but in a constitutive telos inherent to the psyche, making it an a priori ordering factor.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
These fundamental symmetries could be thought of as the archetypes of all matter and the ground of material existence. The elementary particles themselves would be simply the material realization of these underlying symmetries.
Via Heisenberg’s symmetries and Peat’s interpretation, this passage argues that archetypal ordering factors are not exclusively psychological but constitute the generative ground of physical matter.
, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications, 2006thesis
these archetypal categories are not merely constructed but are in some sense both psychological and cosmological in nature. They provide a comprehensive conceptual structure that makes intelligible the complexities of human experience.
Tarnas argues that archetypal ordering factors possess dual ontological status—simultaneously psychological and cosmological—and that their dynamic indeterminacy permits both coherence and creative unpredictability.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006thesis
if number is an archetype, as I tried to show before, it shares this ungraspable vagueness with everything else in the unconscious. It becomes ‘number’ in the usual distinct sense of the word only when its latent orderedness has become conscious.
Von Franz argues that number as an archetypal ordering factor exists initially in a state of latent, unconscious orderedness that becomes determinate only through the act of conscious differentiation.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
The sequence of natural numbers turns out to be unexpectedly more than a mere stringing together of identical units: it contains the whole of mathematics and everything yet to be discovered in this field. Number, therefore, is in one sense an unpredictable entity.
Jung establishes natural number as irreducible and numinous, distinguishing it from mere quantitative abstraction and implicitly positioning it as a primary archetypal ordering factor.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960supporting
his creative ordering itself. The Canaanite Baal, for instance, after he defeated the dragon of the chaotic sea… ordered the chaotic waters into rainfall and rivers and streams. This ordering act made it possible for the first time for plants to flourish.
Moore illustrates the King archetype as a cosmogonic ordering factor whose creative ordering—not merely procreation—generates the conditions for life, linking mythic kingship to the archetypal function of structuring chaos.
, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting
the whole of existence is a continuum which is ordered in itself. It has no manifest appearance and thus cannot be observed immediately by sense perceptions, but its inherent dynamism manifests in images whose structure participates in that of the continuum.
Drawing on Wang-Fu-Chih, von Franz presents the I Ching’s sixty-four symbolic situations as ordered archetypal images that participate in and thereby reveal the latent structure of an unus mundus continuum.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
we propose that archetypes ‘as such’ and archetypal ‘images’ are instantiated via a prediction cascade over various cortical and subcortical systems… a ‘trilogical interplay’ involving the high-level cortex, the low-level cortex, and subcortical/affective systems.
McGovern reformulates archetypal ordering factors in neuropsychological terms as hierarchically organized prediction cascades, offering an empirical substrate for Jung’s structuralist claims.
, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025supporting
Archetypes or Gods? By considering the personified archetypes as Gods, they become more than constitutional propensities and instinctual patterns of behavior, more than ordering structures of the psyche, the ground of its images and vital organs of its functions.
Hillman critiques the reduction of archetypes to mere ordering structures, arguing that their personified character as Gods exceeds any purely organizational or systemic function.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
not only does the world radiate from a center, but it is geometrically organized into four quarters. It is a circle divided by a cross.
Moore demonstrates that cross-cultural cosmogonies instantiate quaternary geometric ordering as an archetypal spatial factor structuring both sacred geography and consciousness.
, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting
the senex view gives the abstract architecture and anatomy of events, plots and graphs, presenting principles of form rather than connections, interrelations, or the flow of feeling.
Hillman describes the senex archetype’s ordering vision as formal and architectural—a consciousness that perceives underlying structure rather than relational flow.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
an adequate paradigm reveals patterns of coherent relations in what are otherwise inexplicable random coincidences. A good theory makes observed patterns intelligible.
Tarnas frames archetypal ordering factors as the theoretical constructs that transform apparent coincidence into intelligible pattern, situating them at the epistemological foundation of his astrological research.
, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, 2006supporting
Innate, predetermined, archetypal factors have been emphasized almost to the exclusion of the personal… both archetypal and personal factors must be brought together in a general theory.
Edinger identifies an imbalance in analytical psychology toward innate archetypal ordering factors at the expense of personal incarnation, arguing for a theoretical integration of both.
, Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002supporting
the individual in his dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors which thwart its intentions.
Jung establishes that in conditions of psychic dissociation, an ordering principle deeper than ego-will is required, pointing implicitly to the archetypes as the legitimate directors of psychic organization.
, The Undiscovered Self, 1957supporting
The sequence of natural numbers turns out to be, unexpectedly, more than a mere stringing together of identical units: it contains the whole of mathematics and everything yet to be discovered in this field.
Von Franz cites Jung’s attribution of numinosity and irreducibility to natural number sequences as evidence for their role as primary ordering archetypes underlying divinatory systems worldwide.
, Creation Myths, 1995supporting
The Pythagoreans… were gripped by the numinosity of numbers and experienced them as divine. The modern mind is so removed from this original experience that we take numbers for granted.
Edinger’s account of Pythagorean arithmos provides the historical-philosophical background for understanding why number functions as an archetypal ordering factor in the depth-psychological tradition.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999aside
That the negative senex is not the result of the ego is clear enough in those desperate… there is a prior disorder in the archetypal ground of the ego.
Hillman locates the source of pathological ordering rigidity not in ego failure but in a disturbance at the level of the archetypal ground, reinforcing the primacy of archetypal factors over personal ones.
, Senex & Puer, 2015aside
the self appears in dreams, myths, and fairytales in the figure of the ‘supraordinate personality’… or in the form of a totality symbol, such as the circle, square, quadratura circuli, cross.
Greene’s citation of Jung on the Self as supraordinate personality embedded in geometric totality symbols illustrates how the Self functions as the supreme archetypal ordering factor in the psyche.
, The Astrology of Fate, 1984aside