Accessing C. G. Jung 4. Jungian Mythologists

Greek coin of Herakleia, Lucania, Italy showing the head

of Athena wearing a helmet decorated with Skylla
hurling a stone and Herakles wrestling the Nemean lion
Image courtesy  of Classical Numismatic Group Inc.

"They are all given here, in these volumes, with many clues, besides, suggesting ways in which they might be put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends -- or by poets to poetic ends -- or by madmen to nonsense and disaster"

Joseph Campbell, On completion of The Masks of God .

I could not possibly start an introduction to Jungian mythologists with anyone other than Joseph Campbell. Not only is he the most accessible of all mythologists, but it was through his work that I first became became familiar with the works of Carl Jung.

There are two outdated and erroneous ideas about the nature of mythology that still linger on in popular opinion and even in the minds of a few academics: that mythologies are based on historical events, but they are so changed over time that they contain no truth, or that they are a sort of primitive science which tries to explain nature. The very word "myth" is most commonly used to label misconceptions (apparently, people are unfamiliar with the word "misconception"). These opinions are not merely saved for cocktail party chatter but extend as far as trying to plot the voyages of Odysseus trying to return home to Ithaca.  Granted, the places described by Homer might, in part, be based on actual locations, but the subject usually misses the point of the stories: Odysseus is hero and husband idealized; Penelope is the perfect wife and Telemachus the perfect son. But it goes beyond that -- to achieve such states, one must have "wrestled with the Nemean lion" -- faced one's own demons in the depths of the unconscious. How could the story have such currency if that were not the case? Yet it is rarely a known metaphor -- we are drawn to it because it contacts the upper levels of the unconscious -- it is quite literally, part of us. Yet, most westerners, understanding this, stop at the point of metaphor as if it is only a convenient explanation. Read this Wikipedia account of the Lankavatara Sutra, which includes:

"On the contrary my teaching is based upon the recognition that the objective world, like a vision, is a manifestation of the mind itself..."

Essentially, we discover that the objective world is really the subjective world. This thought carries through to our time in the discussions between Jung and Pauli that I quoted in an earlier post, and in an interview with Louwrien Wijers in On Creativity (Routledge Classics) p. 141, David Bohm said: “We have got to see that thought is part of this reality and that we are not merely thinking about it, but that we are thinking it”.

The scope of Campbell is vast: from the Palaeolithic to James Joyce; from East to West, he covers it all, but The Masks of God first brought me to Jung, and it is his defining work.

The second Jungian mythologist is Carl Kerényi. Others might well place him first as he actually collaborated with Jung in Essays on a Science of Mythology. besides that title. I highly recommend Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. In addition to being the most detailed work on Dionysos, its Introduction is an essay: Finite and Infinite Life in the Greek Language, which is on the subject of bios (βίος) and zoë (ζωή) -- two words, which stripped of their psychic import and those wonderful nuances that are the Greek language have come down to us (in a pedestrian fashion), in the two English words, biology and zoology.

Finally, although there are many other Jungian mythologists, I have to mention Jung's wife, Emma. Carl Jung once said that he would not cover the Celts as that was an interest of his wife. He was not talking about the pre-Roman La Tène Celts, I believe that I am the only person who writes on their mythology -- Miranda Aldhouse-Green focuses on the, later, Roman period. Jung was not referring to that either, but the even later Welsh stories included in The Mabinogion (Penguin Classics). For thirty years, until her death in 1955, Emma Jung researched and wrote The Grail Legend, which was finished by Marie-Louise von Franz, the greatest of all Jungian psychologists and a scholar who wrote (just to mention this topic) on the Jungian analysis of fairy tales.