Parallel Myths (47 page)
Authors: J.F. Bierlein
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.
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:
Structuralists follow Dürkheim in believing that the mind has “molds” that make it possible to think of the totality of things. These molds are the structuralist’s structures. In their most elementary form they are present in all human minds and are ultimately part of the neurophysiology of the human brain. However, each culture fills the “molds” with its own distinctive content—its own ideas.
Lévi-Strauss is careful to avoid using the term
primitive
to describe “traditional” cultures, pointing out that the allegedly primitive man has the same brain structure as you or I. The “primitive” person is physically capable of understanding the same things that we do, but our term
primitive
carries the connotation of being “childish.” In fact, our so-called modern way of thinking is as much the result of “primitive” thinking or mythology as it is the product of science and technology. And our thinking, according to Lévi-Strauss, operates in the same “infrastructure” as does that of the tribesman.
At times Lévi-Strauss appears to be the hardest to read of all contemporary interpreters of myth. His works are full of abstract, complex, and graphic interrelations between structures, as they are supposedly demonstrated in the myths. However, any overview of structuralism includes the following characteristics:
A structure is not a collection of social relationships, nor is it a theme or trend in cultural history. Unlike Durkheim’s and earlier anthropologists’ view of myth as a collective cultural function, the structure is a “playing out” of the basic human thinking mechanism. Lévi-Strauss says that a structure “is a system of which the members of a society being studied are unaware.”
All human beings have the same basic neurologically based “hardware” for thinking. The fact that this basic brain “infrastructure” is common to all human beings explains parallel myths. Lévi-Strauss calls Durkheim’s “molds” “elemental cells.” Myths are similar because all people have the same “elemental
cells” that are filled with the “software” of a particular culture.Human beings think in dialectical terms, that is to say, we tend to think in pairs of opposites such as god/demon, light/dark, bad/good, and so forth. This dualism means that sometimes one finds a theme in a myth of one culture that does not make sense until it is matched, like a puzzle piece, with the myth of another culture.
Needless to say, many themes can appear in any one given myth. Thus, in matching them with opposites, structural analysis can be very complex and confusing.
Some of the most interesting observations of Lévi-Strauss are on his comparison between the structure of myth and the structure of music. Lévi-Strauss believes that both myth and music are specific forms of language in which a meaning can be found only by taking them in their totality. The following is taken from Lévi-Strauss’s
Myth and Meaning
.
… My main point was that, exactly as in a musical score, it is impossible to understand a myth as a continuous sequence. This is why we should be aware that if we try to read a myth as we read a novel or from left to right, we don’t understand the myth, because we have to apprehend it as a totality and discover that the basic meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the sequence of events … but … by bundles of events even though these events appear at different moments in the story. Therefore we have to read the myth more or less as we would read an orchestral score…. And it is only by treating the myth as if it were an orchestral score, written stave after stave, that we can understand it as a totality, that we can extract meaning out of the myth.
Structuralism has been very controversial for a number of reasons. First, its method seems to rob myth of its “truth,” or an application to life. It can be a very sterile and lifeless treatment of a subject that has given meaning to human life for thousands of years.
With its complex and abstract charts of interrelationships between myths, critics say that structural analysis unnecessarily complicates
the study of myth and puts it into the hands of an “initiated” elite. Another criticism of this method is that if one is looking for structures, one will find them.
Structuralism rejects the psychological approaches of Jung and Freud; the “elemental cells” are part of the structure of the brain and not an element in the human subconscious that is manifested in dreams and myth. It is thus irreconcilably opposed to the theories of Jung and Campbell, as well as to those of the other interpreters of myth we shall look at.
The most damning criticism of structuralism, however, is that it is dehumanizing. Existentialists and literary critics feel that if structuralism is true—and there are, in fact, basic structures that govern human thinking—then we are really biological “cybernetic” thinking machines. This is in sharp contrast to the human faculties of “feeling” and “belief.” Structuralism is seen as a coldly scientific approach to myth, the most human of functions.
During the 1970s, structuralism was a potent source in many of the social sciences, especially in Europe and Latin America. However, Lévi-Strauss has yet to formulate laws of human thinking that are as precise and certain as the law of gravity.
Paul Ricoeur (1913-)
Diametrically opposed to his countryman Claude Lévi-Strauss is French Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who is very interested indeed in the human function of “feeling.”
Heavily influenced by existentialist philosophy, which stresses the importance of a sense of meaning in human life, Ricoeur sees human beings as “fragile” and “fallible,” “suspended between two poles of existence, finitude and the infinite.” Myth, according to Ricoeur, is the cry of “pathos,” an anguished attempt to reconcile the objective, finite world with the infinite. Ricoeur believes that man has always been open to the idea of a transcendent God to reconcile these two
poles, and in the Christian idea of the incarnation of God as Jesus Christ, these poles are reconciled.
Ricoeur is interested in the transition from
mythos
to
logos. Mythos
is a Greek word from which we derive our English word
myth
. It originally carried the connotation of being certain and final, not open to debate, generally accepted.
*
Logos
, in contrast, was the usual Greek word for “word,” and was something that could be debated, or discussed. The passage from
mythos
to
logos
, then, is the passage from a worldview based on a universally accepted myth to philosophical speculation about the human place in the universe.
As
mythos
became
logos
, the certainty was gone and with it the sense of meaning. Without the necessary sense of a certain place in the universe, human beings became fragile.
To compensate for the sense of security that myth once provided, human beings now rely on the faculty of “feeling” to give them the necessary sense of meaning.
Ricoeur’s theories are interesting because they are a point of intersection between existentialist philosophy and the interpretation of myth. Myth is a “reality” because it is felt.
