Archetype of the Sea

The Sea: the mother of all life; spiritual mystery and infinity; death and rebirth; timelessness and eternity; the unconscious. Vast, alien, dangerous, chaos.Waves may symbolize measures of time and represent eternity or infinity.

The sea in pop culture

You see this in the movie James and the Giant Peach where a boy escapes from his two cruel aunts who keep him locked in their old shack he escapes from this life and journeys across the sea with a group of people sized ants during this he finds himself and manages to concur his fears and has a becoming of age experience while in the middle of the ocean an isolated place where he must rely on himself and his few friends.

The sea in pop culture is a place far away from the normal life of today with our cities and suburban living people can go to the sea to find themselves and to have mind expanding adventures.

The sea is also a place a place of mind expansion where you can think beyond the constraints of normal life such as in The Ocean by Led Zeppelin. In the song he talks oh his thoughts expanding going beyond that of just his everyday life of contemplating thoughts he has never contemplated before.

The sea does not just work as a place of adventure in movies in songs too it does in pieces such as The Wild Sea by the Aquabats tells of adventure on the high seas a place far away from the everyday life where one can do as they please without any regard for what would be expected in their everyday life.

The Sea in Classical Literature

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Sea is symbolized here as a sense of entrapment for our main character as he is stuck on the ship which is sailing along in a seemingly endless sea. Even at one part where he is thinking about drinking the water only to remember that it’s impossible to satisfy your thirst with it. He is forced to stay upon the ship that has him trapped for so long as a punishment for killing the albatross. The Sea is unforgiving and impossible to overcome in this story.

In Edgar Allen Poe’s City In The Sea, The Sea symbolizes a sense of death for all of mankind. Poe’s poem shows the city in the West which is an appropriate location to give the city due to the sun setting in that part and is often identified as death. The waves of the sea begin to turn red toward the end of the poem to show the signs of hell approaching. The sea in this classic literature shows a scarier side then the more modern counterparts we see today.

The Sea in Film

Titanic: Number one movie in demonstrating the meaning of archetypal setting of the sea has to be Titanic. In this box-office hit, Kate Winslet plays Rose, a young rich girl who has yet to discovery herself and who she is really is. Leonardo Dicaprio plays Jack, a free-spirited handsome poor boy. These two come from very parallel worlds and once they meet on the Titanic, life for them changes in numerous many ways. As she spends more time with Jack aboard the ship, Rose grows into a independent woman who learns she doesn’t need her mother in order to get ahead in life, and begins to live life the way Jack does, fun and downright reckless. Sadly, as Rose is growing into a version of herself she has always wanted to be and falling in love all at once, the ship Titanic is hit by an ice berg and death is suddenly center stage. The archetypal setting of sea in this movie is played out in several forms; Rose grows into a totally new woman, Jack learns how to behave in certain situations, and death that is brought upon of half the ship. All of these events to happen on the sea where the archetypal setting is played out so perfectly.

The Guardian: Many may not know but behind every soldier there is a story. In this film, Ashton Kutcher is a newly enrolled student at an “A” U.S. Coast Guard school, fresh out of high school as the number one swimmer. Kevin Costner is the top rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard and has now become Kutcher’s newest student in training. Kutcher’s character Jake Fischer is an arrogant but well-hearted student, yet he let’s his character of cockiness get in the way of developing as a soldier. Costner makes tasks even more difficult for Kutcher, to teach him, discipline him to be the best he can be without attitude to blind him. Along the way, they collide with ever such tension but through the events of rescue and sea, both Kutcher and Costner grow to be a better version of them self, realizing what really matters in their life and how to appreciate ever moment of it, regardless of the past. The archetypal setting of sea adds to the development of the characters played by Kutcher and Costner, they go through a period of growth from who they were to a better version of who they’ve learned to be.

Finding Nemo: This Disney/Pixar classic is about a father, who has a hard time letting go of the one son he has. Due to that troubling process, Marlin never really allows Nemo (his son) to do much of anything. With Nemo’s growing frustration he touches a boat and ends up being taken by an Australian dentist, now Marlin sets off on an adventure to find his son Nemo. During his adventure, Marlin faces a new side to his own world; he meets Dory, a short-term memory fish who brings out the fun side of Marlin, he faces fishes from the deep dark depth of the sea, he encounters a close call to death from “vegetation” sharks, but most importantly he grows into the fish he once was, fun and spontaneous. The setting of the sea plays an important role in demonstrating the symbolism of growth and timelessness that Marlin develops throughout the film; he was in the beginning a very scared and protective fish, but as his adventure continues he grows into a totally new and opened perspective fish.

The Sea in Mythology and Fairy Tales

In the original Little Mermaid Fairy Tale by Hans Christian Anderson, there is a classical tale of death and rebirth on the sea. In the original version the Prince marries the Princess of a neighboring kingdom, and the little mermaids heart breaks. The sea which has told her that if she doesn’t get him to marry her within three days she will turn into sea foam and perish. Awaiting her death, her sisters come to her with a knife the sea witch has traded them for their long locks of hair. The sea which said that if the little mermaid killed the prince and allowed his blood to drip on her feet, she would become a mermaid again. But the little mermaid cannot bring herself to kill someone she loved so much, so when dawn comes Her body dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she has turned into a spirit, a daughter of the air. The other daughters of the air tell her she has become like them because she strove with all her heart to gain an eternal soul. She will earn her own soul by doing good deeds, and she will eventually rise up into the kingdom of God. So the little mermaid has died and been reborn because of her good heart.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus is reborn as a better man and the long journey on the sea is what changes him. Odysseus love of glory gets him in a lot of trouble in the beginning of the epic. He desires to be acknowledged for preforming great feats. Because of this, he gets in trouble with both the Cyclops and Poseidon. Over the course of his journey he realizes that he should change his ways. He learns patience and that by having patience he’ll be successful in his endeavors. When he returns home he shows this, dressed as a beggar all of the suitors trying to marry his wife since he left are making fun of him and jeering at him. The old Odysseus would have struck out immediately, but now he knows to wait and wait for his advantage. In the end he ends up killing all of the suitors.

The Archetype of the Sea

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In the Grimm Fairy Tale The Fisherman and the Sea, a lesson is taught. The Fisherman catches a flounder that is really an enchanted prince. His wife makes the fisherman go back tons of times and ask for more and more like to become emperor, pope and eventually God. When she asks the flounder to become like God the flounder takes everything away from them and puts them back in the dirty shack they started out in. Because no one can be like God.

"The wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt." Isaiah 57:20