The Creator Inner Child Archetype
A deep dive into the archetype of the creator inner child for my project - The Book of Love : An Oracle Deck For Emotional Healing
Hello!
We are going to move straight into this month’s inner child archetype - if you’re not sure what I’m talking about - see this post which has a bit more info on what the inner child is and what this project is about. Note that we each hold the capacity for an aspect of each archetype - there might be some which you read and think YES: This is me! and some you feel - meh, a version of + some you can’t locate at all. Some archetypes may cause resistance in you, consider the truth that in each archetype there is both a mirror and a medicine. These archetypes come from study, inner and outer investigation but they are largely of my creation for The Book of Love, out 2025 - you’ll find a sketch of the card artwork below too - eep!
So - thank you for being here: let’s dive in
Today we are exploring The Creator inner child archetype:
Some adult archetypes which come to mind in synergy are: The Artist, The Poet and there are also inferences of The Trickster + The Comic at times. In tarot speak this card may speak to the knight or son of cups. As we go forth, please remember as these are inner child archetypes, we are noting that some of the archetypal weight given to adults or adult figures are not appropriate for children. Some aspects which are characteristic and even powerful in adult archetypes are crushing and unfair for children to hold - this delineation invites us into our ability to listen compassionately for these archetypes afresh, away from and perhaps interested in our pre disposed conceptions, in turn holding ourselves with this same care and curiosity.
The Ursula Le Guin quote ‘The creative child is the child who survived’ is one I often come back to. I think it works on multiple levels: children survive the obstacles and or blind spots of their caregivers by using their ingenuity - they learn how to get around challenges with whatever they have to hand or heart. For some this means escaping into creative imaginary worlds, for others developing a magnificent persona to have certain needs met, for some the cultivation of psychic skills and so on - and for most of us a bit of a medley. Many of these ‘get around’s’ cause us shame as we grow up and we feel poorer for them. Although we may want to unclench our brave little fingers from much of what was being held when we were young - I would like to hold space for the creative ingenuity of surviving childhood - whether navigated by hook or by crook, as they say.
‘The creative child is the child who survived’ also speaks to what creativity really is - outside of the idea of the artsy kid or the kid that could draw the best bird (though this too is a symptom of creativity) - but more than that, deeper than that, it is our innate urge to create: to find solutions and connections, to build things, to make something out of nothing - it’s the urge to live. Whether this appears for you through a wish to sing or shout or cook or dance or smile so much you change the world - we all have access to being creative, just by virtue of being alive. Humans are made to create, we just can’t stop, we are always making more more more!
Through this lens, as with many of the archetypes, every child is a creator child - some simply fit more neatly into the mainstream boxes of what that is supposed to look like. But as we focus really deeply on this archetype - the child who holds so much of this sense for me is the deeply feeling child. The child who feels so much she just has to go out and build a world, even if no-one ever knows about it. The creator child carries the spark of life force energy which often manifests as a level of depth unusual for a child, and is usually very difficult for that child to hold in her small arms without loving guidance.
So, what is the role of the creator? The creator child creates because they have to, there’s something so wide in them, be it imagery, feeling or sensation that they have to work it out. They are acting as a channel, a processor for the world - and often more locally the family. This function of cleaning and tweaking often goes un thanked, sometimes totally unnoticed for what it is energetically. This can deeply affect the chi or energetic balance of the child - creating a kind of void-like energy in which the child hoovers up much of the difficult around them. This often then goes on to present as depression, shyness, anxiety, illness etc.
