Meme - The Archetypal Alphabet，The Gene of Words and Culture

“Archetypes are the universal patterns of human experience, transcending culture and history, and shaping our behavior and understanding.”— Carl Jung

The Archetypal Letters  brings together my in-depth exploration of the archetypal origins of the 26 letters of the English alphabet, tracing them back to their earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic forms. Along this path, many striking coincidences and symbolic logics emerge：patterns that appear accidental, yet recur with surprising consistency. But what do these discoveries truly mean? Are they merely imaginative associations, or do they point to a deeper underlying structure?

In my view, they lead to a long-overlooked insight: letters themselves are cultural memes.

Words are the seeds of culture, and letters are the roots from which words grow. Just as genes construct life at the biological level, letters construct language, thought, and civilization at the spiritual level. They not only gave rise to Western writing systems, but also became the foundation of Mandarin pinyin in the East. As structures deeply embedded in the human Collective Unconscious, letters are instinctively recorded, replicated, and transmitted, carrying spiritual experience across generations.

When I began to view letters through the lens of archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, a coincidence caught my attention: the modern alphabet originates from 23 Phoenician letters, and humans happen to possess 23 pairs of chromosomes. With further observation, I noticed that letter archetypes naturally form complementary, yin–yang pairings. When these letters are reassembled and arranged in pairs, the overall structure unexpectedly resembles a DNA double helix. I came to call this structure the “Meme Fish.”

This “fish” is not a literal image, but a symbolic framework. Within it, letter archetypes express a polarity of opposites—distinct yet interdependent—much like the inseparable dualities of life itself. Certain letter pairings naturally echo ancient symbolic systems of soul and body, heaven and earth, life and death, as if these meanings had long been embedded within the structure of language.

One example can be seen in the parallel formation of the words Gene and Meme. Both contain a pair of the letter “e–e,” whose Egyptian prototype represents the human figure. This pair of “e’s” symbolizes a yin–yang pair of human beings, a shared life foundation common to both gene and meme. In gene, the two “e’s” are connected by “n,” whose archetype is the serpent—reflecting humanity’s animal and biological roots. In meme, they are connected by “m,” whose archetype is water—aptly reflecting that culture, like rivers and oceans, is the cradle of civilization.

Genes nurture life on the material level, while memes nurture culture on the spiritual level. They are not opposites, but companions: one shapes the body, the other shapes meaning. Letters, therefore, are far more than tools of communication. They are deeper cultural carriers，the skeletal structure of human spirit as meme, instinctively propagating language, symbolism, and civilization itself.