MYTHOLOGICAL STUDIES
Mythological Studies explores the understanding of human experience revealed in mythology and in the manifold links between myth and ritual, literature, art, culture, and religious experience. Special attention is given to depth psychology and archetypal approaches to the study of myth.
Mythological Studies explores the understanding of human experience revealed in mythology and in the manifold links between myth and ritual, literature, art, culture, and religious experience. Special attention is given to depth psychology and archetypal approaches to the study of myth.
Mythic forms
Descent From the Gods
by Iona Miller
by Iona Miller
We Don't Live Just One Myth
If we compulsively or obsessively live out one single mytheme, all the others necessarily fall into the unconscious through neglect, denial, or lack of recognition. They are ignored.
“...put it my way, what we are really, and the reality we live, is our psychic reality,
which is nothing but...the poetic imagination going on day and night.”
James Hillman, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and
the World Is Getting Worse, p. 62
Excerpts from James Hillman on Polytheism
“Jung used a polycentric description for the objective psyche. The light of nature was multiple. Following the traditional descriptions of the anima mundi. Jung wrote of the lumen naturae as a multiplicity of partial consciousness, like stars or sparks or luminous fishes’ eyes. A polytheistic psychology corresponds with this description and provides its imagistic formulation in the major traditional language of our civilization, i.e., classical mythology. By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, polytheistic psychology would find place for each spark. It would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, giving each God its due over that portion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy, which calls for an archetypal background. It would accept the multiplicity of voices, the Babel of the anima and animus, without insisting upon unifying them into one figure, and accept too the dissolution process into diversity as equal in value to the coagulation process into unity. The pagan gods and goddesses would be restored to their psychological domain.”
“Polytheistic psychology obliges consciousness to circulate among the field of powers. Each god has his due as each complex deserves its respect in its own right. In this circularity of topoi there seem no preferred positions, no sure statements about positive and negative, and therefore no need to rule out some configurations topoi as “pathological”; pathology itself will require a polytheistic re-visioning. When the idea of progress through hierarchical stages is suspended, there will be more tolerance for the nongrowth, non-upward, and nonordered components of the psyche. There is more room for variance when there is more place given to variety. We may then discover that many of the judgments which have previously been called psychological or rather theological. They were statements about dreams and fantasies and behavior, and people too, coming from a monotheistic ideal of wholeness (the self), that devalues the primal multiplicity of souls…”
“Babel and the proliferation of cults in the Hellenistic period always seen a degeneration… One might, however, consider the proliferation of cults as a therapeia (“worship, service, and care”) of the complexes in their many forms. Then one can understand the psychic fragmentation supposedly typical of our times as the return of the repressed, bringing a return of psychological polytheism. Fragmentation would then indicate many possibilities for individuation and might even be the result of individuation: each individual struggling with his daimones. If there is only one model of individuation can there be true individuality? The complexes that will not be integrated force recognition of their autonomous power. There archetypal cores will not serve the single goal of monotheistic wholeness. Babel may be a religious decline from one point of view and it may be a psychological improvement, since through the many tongues a fuller discordant psychic reality is being reflected… Without the gods, who offer differentiated models for the peculiar psychic phenomena of anima and animus, we see them as projections. Then we try to take them back with introverted measures. But “The individual ego is much too small, its brain much too feeble, to incorporate all the projections withdrawn from the world. Ego and brain burst asunder in the effort; the psychiatrist calls it schizophrenia” (CW 11, par. 145). Without a consciously polytheistic psychology are we not more susceptible to an unconscious fragmentation call schizophrenia?”
“As I have spelled out in several later writings, psychological polytheism is concerned less with worship than with attitudes, with the way we see things and place them. Gods, for psychology, are neither believed in nor addressed directly. They are rather adjectival than substantive; a polytheistic experience finds existence qualified with archetypal presence and recognizes faces of the gods in these qualifications. Only when these qualities are literalized, set apart as substances, that is, become theologized, do we have to imagine them through the category of belief.”
Hillman writes in The Lament of the Dead,
"When Jung seeks the myth, there are basic questions like in The Red Book: 'what is my myth, where is my soul?'. But the question is that he's looking for the myth, not my myth. [...] everyone reading Jung ends up thinking 'I have to find my myth". What's my myth? What's the myth I live?' And it all comes down to an astrological statement about the kind of person you are, or you use the myth of the puer, the myth of the hero, the myth of the soul, the myth of the non-wanted daughter, ridiculous things. Jung wanted - the myth -. Joseph Campbell would say that the myth is the hero; beware, not the hero myth, but the myth is the hero, the myth is what revives, the myth is the true psychic energy expressed in the Language, shapes and figure. Jung discovered this. He discovered the myth at base. [...] there is a responsibility to bring the general into life... to share it with other people."
Our lived, our loves, our life is not just personal, 'ours', but it always leans on a collective background, transpersonal, archetypal and legendary. That is why when we communicate sometimes with others or in writing or in public, a lot of people feel that there are certain reflections. We perceive them, ours. This kind of perception occurred to anyone who listened to Jung or Hillman's speeches. They thought "but he's talking directly to me or me"... this is the mythical background that lives there. Acknowledging it is extremely important. (Eldo Stellucci)
“Acorn“, Io Miller, 2017
In James Hillman’s ‘acorn theory’ of soul we already hold the potential for unique possibilities inside ourselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It shows in our calling and life’s work when fully actualized. Our calling in life is inborn and our mission in life is to realize its imperatives. The "acorn theory" is the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn. The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world.
"When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed.". --James Hillman
In James Hillman’s ‘acorn theory’ of soul we already hold the potential for unique possibilities inside ourselves, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak tree. It shows in our calling and life’s work when fully actualized. Our calling in life is inborn and our mission in life is to realize its imperatives. The "acorn theory" is the idea that our lives are formed by a particular image, just as the oak's destiny is contained in the tiny acorn. The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world.
"When the gods arrive on stage, everything becomes silent and the eyelids close. Plunged into oblivion by this experience, we re-emerge and without knowing exactly what is happened, we know only that we have been transformed.". --James Hillman