Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (7 page)

To Freud, myths were a product of personal psychology and dreams were the source of these myths. Specifically, he believed that most myths were sexual in nature. Heroes slaying dragons and gods killing other gods were all really forms of every male’s desire to kill his father and have sex with his mother. Or, as Barry Powell summarizes Freud’s thinking in
Classical Myth
, “Mythical kings and queens represent parents, sharp weapons are the male sexual organ, and caves, rooms and houses symbolize the mother’s containing womb. The imagery of myths can therefore be translated into that of sex….”

In the early 1900s, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, a disciple of Freud, took this concept—that all myths are generated in the unconscious mind—in a different direction. Born in Basel, Switzerland, Carl Gustav Jung was the son of a minister. As a boy, he was fascinated with superstition, mythology, and the occult, and he first planned to study archaeology at the University of Basel. Instead he graduated as a physician from the University of Zurich in 1902 and soon became a student of Freud’s psychiatry, using Freud’s psychoanalytical theories.

But Jung broke with his mentor over Freud’s emphasis on sexuality. Rejecting Freud’s belief that the symbolism of the unconscious was primarily sexual, Jung said dreams came both from what he called the personal and the collective unconscious. While the personal unconscious reflects an individual’s experiences, the collective unconscious is inherited, shared by all humankind. According to Jung, art, religion, dreams, and myths are the means in which the unconscious finds expression. Jung believed that the entire psychological development of humanity could be traced by studying myths, fairy tales, and fables.

The collective unconscious, Jung stated, was organized into basic patterns and symbols, which he called
archetypes
, and which all mythologies shared. Gods and heroes, mythic places—such as the home of the gods or the underworld—and battles between different generations for control of a throne were all found in every system of myths. Jung asserted these mythical archetypes were so fundamental to humanity that “If all the world’s traditions were cut off at a single blow, the whole of mythology and the whole history of religion would start all over again with the next generation.”

Where Freud had taken a limited view of the importance of religion or a sense of the sacred in the realm of psychology, Jung saw mythology as a powerful connection to the sacred and he regretted the modern loss of faith in this mysterious part of the human experience. “From time immemorial, men have had ideas about a Supreme Being (one or several) and about the Land of the Hereafter,” Jung wrote in
Man and His Symbols.
“Only today do they think they can do without such ideas.”

Acknowledging that humanity had progressed into a complex, rational, scientifically ordered world, which rejected those things that cannot be proved, Jung argued for a spiritual component in life that mythology—and, later, organized religion—has traditionally provided throughout human history.

“There is, however, a strong empirical reason why we should cultivate thoughts that can never be proved. It is that they are known to be useful,” Jung wrote in
Man and His Symbols
. “A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises a man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable.”

Echoing Jung’s theories, late in his life, Albert Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

Science, history, anthropology, language, psychology, rituals, religion, and spirituality. All of these frameworks help to explain how myth has operated since the dawn of human time. Yet none of them alone does it completely. As classicist Barry B. Powell has observed, “Myth taken together is too complex, too many-faceted, to be explained by a single theory.”

That myths reflect so many aspects of the human condition—our history, our innermost thoughts, our best and worst behavior, an acceptable code of conduct—makes trying to fit them into one neat theoretical framework impossible. It is like trying to make many different people wear a single suit of clothes. There are just too many sizes and shapes for that to work.

Needless to say, for thousands of years, the myths that have organized human civilizations and given faith to worshippers across all time are clearly something greater than a collection of compelling stories about dysfunctional gods, flawed heroes, sex-crazed tricksters, or primeval monsters lurking in the closets of our minds.

Heady stuff. It may be wise to remember the words of American humorist James Thurber, who once wrote: “It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”