Parallel Myths

by J. F. Bierlein

  In an alternate version of this story, he was blinded by Hera. Hera and Zeus were engaged in one of their frequent marital arguments as a result of Zeus’s unfaithfulness. Zeus defended himself by saying that females receive more pleasure than males from sex. Hera disagreed and called Teiresias, who had been both male and female, to settle the argument.

  Teiresias answered the question in rhyme: “If the elements of sexual pleasure are ten, three times three parts are the women’s and but one part to men!” Zeus laughed heartily at the verse that supported his opinion; Hera was furious and struck the seer blind. As a reward for his service, however, Teiresias was given an extraordinarily long life. Thus this seer appears in hundreds of myths at very distant points in epic history.

  With all of these stories of Teiresias’s general knowledge, it was very common for kings to ask the blind seer to settle disputes, solve crimes, and answer difficult questions. So Oedipus gladly accepted Teiresias’s offer to help. Teiresias responded that the murderer of Laius was a descendant of the children of the Hydra’s teeth. If this descendant were killed, the plague would end.

  The Hydra was a monster that had been slain; when its teeth were sown as seeds, adult human beings sprang from the ground. One of these descendants of the Hydra’s teeth was old Menoeceus, the father of Jocasta and unwitting grandfather of Oedipus. When Teiresias spoke, Menoeceus knew that he had few years left anyway and threw himself from the city wall. The plague then ended.

  However, it was not Menoeceus that Teiresias had had in mind; it was Oedipus, who, as Menoeceus’s grandson, was also a descendant of the Hydra’s teeth. When Teiresias told all of the court of Thebes that the old man’s grandson needed to die, Jocasta replied that Menoeceus had no grandchildren. The seer then revealed to all that Oedipus was Menoeceus’s grandson, Laius’s son, and Jocasta’s son and husband: Oedipus had killed his own father and married his mother. Even more horrifying, Oedipus and Jocasta had had a daughter, Antigone, through their incestuous union.

  At first, this news was too shocking to be believed. But Oedipus wanted the whole matter settled once and for all. So he contacted Periboea and asked her to tell of his origins—was he the son of Periboea and Polybus or was he not? Periboea responded by letter.

  In the passing years, her husband had told her the oracle’s shocking prophecy about Oedipus. Her letter described this prophecy, and told of how the child was found and raised. She further reported that Oedipus was in the area where Laius was killed at the time of the murder. This damning evidence, confirming the allegations of Teiresias, was too much to bear.

  Queen Jocasta hanged herself. Oedipus, seized with remorse and disgust, gouged out his own eyes. He was led away by Antigone, who was both his sister and his daughter.

  It is said that Oedipus wandered the earth for many years thereafter, later encountering the hero Theseus. There are conflicting tales that he died bravely in battle or was hounded to death by the vengeance of the Furies at Colonus.

  The fact is that no logical explanation of the many kinds of suffering is possible. But in certain experiences, and in the contemplation of certain events, we can on occasion grasp, momentarily and elusively, a shadowy outskirt of the truth. We can grasp it as we contemplate the Crucifixion—considered as at once the voluntary and necessary suffering of God himself. And we can grasp it as we read certain myths, such as that of the death of the blind Oedipus, who had suffered so atrociously and unjustly. But the reconciliation implied in this myth must be understood, not with reference to a future life, but as existing in eternal reality.

  —Victor Gollancz (1893-1967),

  British publisher and writer, From Darkness to Light

  Carl Gustav Jung

  Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.

  The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the cooperation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fulness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a word of God.

  Carl Gustav Jung was the son of a Protestant minister of the German-speaking canton of Basel; he spent all of his life in Switzerland, between the cities of Basel and Zurich. Interestingly, Johann Jakob Bachofen was a friend and colleague of Jung’s paternal grandfather, also named Carl Gustav, and the elderly Bachofen was a familiar sight on the streets of Basel during the boyhood of the pioneer psychiatrist. Trained as a physician and neurologist, Jung became a disciple of Sigmund Freud, who for a time referred to Jung as “my dear son” and as his “heir” to the leadership of the international psychiatric movement.

  By 1912, however, the two had parted company, and not on the best of terms. Jung freely acknowledged the contributions of Janet and others to Freud’s thinking; Freud was loathe to concede this. Jung questioned Freud’s “sacred” Oedipal theory of infantile sexuality; Jung thought it ridiculous to suppose that a male child was sexually attracted to his mother and jealous of the father. Jung also acknowledged the contributions of the anthropologists and sociologists Bastian, Lévy-Bruhl, and Dürkheim, incorporating them into his psychological theory. Most important, however, he continued to believe, following Freud, that the images in our dreams and our myths are definitely related. However, Jung did not feel that they were the products of individual memories.

  Jung noted the connection between the symbols of dreams and those found in myth early in his career:

  As early as 1909 I realized that I could not treat latent psychoses if I did not understand their symbolism. It was then that I began to study mythology.

  Jung was critical of Freud’s dismissal of myth and religion as mere projections of the personal unconscious. For Jung, these images were universal, shared by all human beings. These theories were popularized during the 1970s and 1980s by Joseph Campbell, who wrote:

  An altogether different approach [to myth] is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent the wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums [sic]. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science,* which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myth alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.

  Following the “Elementary Thought” advanced by Bastian, the “conscious collective” of Dürkheim, and the “representations collectives” of Lévy-Bruhl, Jung believed in the “collective unconscious,” that every human being carries an inborn, neurologically based element of the unconscious that is manifested in dreams and myth.

  The scripts of our dreams and our myths are contained in the collective unconscious; the characters are called “archetypes” by Jung. For example, Jung and Campbell identify “the hero” as an archetype common to all parallel heroic myths. Likewise
, “the trickster” appears in similar myths as a recurring archetype.

  Of the collective unconscious, Jung wrote:

  A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the “personal unconscious.” But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious.” I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.

  My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature, and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of preexisting forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite forms to certain psychic elements.

  Jung wrote of the archetypes:

  The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them “motifs.” In the psychology of the primitive they correspond to Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of “representations collectives,” and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss* as “categories of the imagination.” Adolf Bastian long ago called them “elementary” or “primordial” thoughts. From these references it should be clear that my idea of the archetype—literally a pre-existent form—does not stand alone but is something that is recognized and named in other fields of study.

  What the word “archetype” means in the nominal sense is clear enough, then, from its relations with myth, esoteric teaching and fairy tales…. So far mythologists have always had recourse to solar, lunar, meteorological, vegetal and various other ideas of this kind. The fact that myths are first and foremost psychic [i.e., of the psyche, or “mind”] phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul is something that they have absolutely refused to see until now. Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need … an irresistible urge to assimilate all outer experiences to inner, psychic events…. All the mythological processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective experiences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projections.

  Note the similarities between Jung’s concept of the archetype and Victor Hugo’s description of the “types” that recur in literature (from The Modern Tradition, edited by Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr.).

  … the type lives. Were it but an abstraction, men would not recognize it, and would allow this shadow to go its own way. The tragedy termed “classic” makes phantoms; the drama creates living types. A lesson which is a man; a myth with a human face so plastic that it looks at you in the mirror; a parable that nudges you…. Types are cases foreseen of God; genius realizes them. It seems that God prefers to teach a lesson through man, in order to inspire confidence. The poet walks the street with living men; he has their ear. Hence the efficacy of types. Man is a premise, the type a conclusion; God creates the phenomenon, genius gives it a name.

  Types go and come on a common level in Art and in Nature; they are the ideal realized. The good and the evil of man are in these figures. From each of them springs, in the eye of the thinker, a humanity.

  Jung saw that myth gives meaning to human life. An example of this was found during his visit to the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Jung was keenly interested in their myths and religious views, yet he found the Pueblos reluctant to discuss these matters with an outsider. Finally an old chief told him, “The sun is God. Everyone can see that.” He then told Jung that the ceremonial dances of the Pueblos were necessary to keep the sun shining and on its proper course. The Pueblos did not do this for themselves alone, but for all humankind. Moreover, the old man despaired of what would happen if these dances were forgotten.

  Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious led him into extensive study of esoteric religions, Gnosticism, alchemy, and mythology. Throughout his studies of all of these, he saw a consistent pattern of more or less identical archetypes at work.

  Jung himself was reticent about giving any precise definition of his own religious views. Joseph Campbell describes him as a “polytheist” who saw in the archetypes “gods” that were manifestations of a single “God,” much as the Hindus consider all the many “gods” to be mere manifestations of Brahman. Jung had a very critical view of his own pastor father; he felt that the elder Jung had experienced a crisis of faith but was too weak to deal with it or even to admit it. Yet Jung often spoke of God in terms that are reminiscent of the Protestantism of his boyhood. Considering the unconscious nature of the archetypes and their presence in every human psyche, he may be spoken of as a “panentheist,” or one who believes that God is inside of everything. But one thing is certain, Jung did not consider the elements of spiritual life “unreal,” nor did he dismiss them as mere “projections,” as did Freud. My conjecture is that Jung believed in a transcendent-other God who was made available, or “revealed,” to human experience through the archetypes.

  Even thirty years after his death, Jung remains controversial. His presidency of a Nazi-sponsored German psychiatric society has led to loose charges of Nazi sympathies. Jung angrily denounced such charges, pointing out that his leadership of the society enabled him to help many German Jews. Many of Jung’s closest circle of disciples were Jews. Moreover, although he published some articles in the 1930s that may be construed as sympathetic to Nazism, his writings after 1940 are uniformly pro-Ally.

  On the one hand, the Jungian approach to myth and religion has been viewed by Christians as a valuable tool for understanding man’s innate spiritual behavior, and viewing religion as a permanent part of humanity—not as a phase to be “outgrown.” He is quoted by the American Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, and his writings have been used by Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox theologians. Jung’s speculation that “sonship” and the role of the Holy Spirit would be revitalizing to the Christian faith presaged the widespread charismatic movements within the Church.*

  Juxtaposed to this, one finds the Jungian archetypes have also been adapted by New Age religion as a justification for a new polytheism and a reduction of religion to esoteric symbols. Here, Jung is given as a psychological rationale for a new Gnosticism, a form of Christianity based not on faith but on “secret” knowledge imparted to an elite.

  In any case, the Protestant pastor officiating at Jung’s funeral eulogized him as having restored the dignity and intellectual standing of the religious life after its rejection by Freud and other twentieth-century thinkers.

  Nevertheless, the Jungian approach to the interpretation of myth provides an intriguing psychological explanation for parallelism, blending psychiatry with sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism.

  A MODERN NONPSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH: STRUCTURALISM

  Claude Lévi-Strauss

  Probably there is something deep in my own mind which makes it likely that I was always what is now being called a structuralist. My mother told me that, when I was about two years old and still unable to read, of course, I claimed that I was actually able to read. And when I was asked why, I said that when I looked at the signboards on shops … “boulanger” [French for “baker”
] or “boucher” [French for “butcher”]—I was able to read something because what was obviously similar, from a graphic point of view, in the writing could not mean anything but “bou,” the same first syllable of “boucher” and “boulanger.” Probably, there is nothing more than that to the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant elements among superficial differences.

  The earlier modern interpretations of myth, those of Frobenius, Bastían, Lévy-Bruhl, and Dürkheim, were based on cultural history and the social relationships within cultures. The psychological approach of Janet, Freud, and Jung (and thus Campbell) viewed myth as something different from cultural history, with an internal psychological source. Yet another approach can be found in the Structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

  During the 1960s, an announcement by Lévi-Strauss stirred great excitement in the scientific and anthropological communities. He claimed that if one were only able to unravel the invariant structures of human thinking, then laws of human behavior could be formulated that were as certain and precise as the law of gravity.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss was born to Jewish parents in Brussels, but grew up in France and spent most of his life there. This is fitting, as he is, to some degree, the heir to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Émile Dürkheim. Dürkheim, you will recall, believed that the parallel myths could be explained by a neurologically based set of “molds” of myths common to all human beings. As Marvin Harris writes in his book Cultural Materialism: