This is an essay writ in the name of expanding the corpus of written works describing experiences of archetropy and archetypal identity. It is also a long journal entry. While I try to stick to defining my experience with and view of the archetypes in question rather than defining the archetypes themselves, there are statements in the essay that I would in other contexts prefer to defend better than I do here. There are even statements that I am, after a base amount of editing, unsure I fully stand by — especially in the section on the Knight, which I know rather less intimately than the Soldier. Please understand that in spite of flawed phrasing this essay is about my experience, not about fundamental truth or about how other people should relate to these archetypes.
Additionally, you will see the neopronoun “aet.” Derived from the archaic “hwaet” and “it,” this is an effort to solve a problem I had with referring to the archetypal forms of the Knight and Soldier: I found myself alternating, sometimes wildly, between it, he, and they. “The Soldier” is considerably more person-shaped than “the archetype,” but also distinct from the actual person that is “a soldier.” The pronoun “aet” helps to distinguish the person-shaped archetypal role both from actual people and from things that do not resemble or behave like people. It also creates its own ambiguities, and I haven’t yet decided if I will use it in the future…but trust me when I say certain sections of this essay were much more ambiguous before I edited it in.