My research on the Archetypes is what has brought me to the study of Astrology and the Tarot. Archetypes are the building blocks of the Universe, the letters of the divine alphabet, the notes of the cosmic music, the universal underlining primordial essences. All things participate in an archetype or an archetypal combination. They inform and impel and permeate all of existence both human psyche and cosmos has an all, the micro and the macro, above and below, the inner and outer, spirit and matter.
I could not find better words to describe what they mean for me than this quote from James Hillman:

There is no place without Gods
And no activity that does not enact them,
Every fantasy, every experience, has its archetypal reason
There is nothing that does not belong to one God or another.
The Gods are cosmic prospectives in witch the Soul participates.
They are the Lords of his realms of being, the patterns for its mimesis.
The Soul can not be except in one of their patters.
All psychic reality is governed by one or another archetypal fantasy, given sanction by a God.
I can not but be in them.

Let us then imagine the archetypes has the deepest pattern of psychic functioning, the roots of the Soul, governing the perspectives we have of our selves and the world.
They are the axiomatic self evident images to witch psychic life and our theories about it ever return.

But one thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance. By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God. And Gods, religions sometimes say, are less accessible to the senses and to the intellect than they are to the imaginative vision and emotion of the soul.
There is no place without Gods and no activity that does not enact them. Every fantasy, every experience has its archetypal reason. There is nothing that does not belong to one God or another.
James Hillman in 'Re-Visioning Psychology'