Now, the senex includes both the older and the elder , which are different aspects of this whole complex. In other words, with the elder you associate the qualities of wisdom, knowledge, and guidance, but you also have the older, which includes the bitter, limiting, judgmental, dismissive, bitter qualities of a person often associated with Saturn. In the archetypal imagination, it can t be seen as good or bad. The archetype itself is ambivalent. Basically, age doesn t make an elder.
Age makes an older.
It s a matter of what a person has learned while aging. Elders, by tribal imagination, and by more recent definition, are those who have learned from their own lives, those who have extracted a knowledge of themselves and the world from their own lives. We know that a person can age and still be very infantile. This happens if a person doesn t open and understand the nature of his or her own life and the kind of surprising spirit that inhabits him or her. That s a good but complicated question.