Myth as Metaphor
In
order to secure its co-operation the religions have long turned to myths for
help, or rather, the myths always flung out bridges between the helpless
consciousness and the effective idées forces of the unconscious.
But you cannot, artificially and with an effort of will, believe the
statements of myth if you have not previously been gripped by them.
If you are honest, you will doubt the truth of the myth because our
present-day consciousness has no means of understanding it.
Historical and scientific criteria do not lend themselves to a recognition of
mythological truth; it can be grasped only by the intuitions of faith or by
psychology, and in the latter case although there may be insight it remains
ineffective unless it is backed by experience. MC 751
I
view traditional mythologies as serving
four functions. The
first function is that of reconciling consciousness to the preconditions of its
own existence – that is, of aligning waking consciousness to the mysterium
tremendum of this universe, as it is. TAT 2
…
half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious
traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half
contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have
people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts,
and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think
religious metaphors are lies.
The
life of a mythology springs from and depends on the metaphoric vigor of its
symbols. TAT 6
What
Adolph Bastian described as “elementary ideas,” and
Jung referred to as
“archetypes of the
collective unconscious” are the biologically rooted
motivating powers and connoted references for the mythologies that, cast in the
metaphors of changing historical and cultural periods, remain themselves
constant. TAT6
A
mythology may be understood as an organization of metaphorical figures
connotative of states of mind that are not finally of this or that location or
historical period, even though the figures themselves seem on their surface to
suggest such a concrete localization. The metaphorical
languages of both myshology and
metaphysics are noy
denotative of actual worlds
or gods, but rather connote levels and entities within the person touched by
them. Metaphors only seem to describe the outer world of time
and place. Their real universe is the spiritual realm of the
inner life. The
Practically
every mythology in the world has used this “elementary” or co-natural idea of a
virgin birth to refer to a spiritual rather than an historical reality.
TAT 7
The
same, as I have suggested, is true of the metaphor of the Promised Land, which
in its denotation plots nothing but a piece of earthy geography to be taken by
force. Its connotation – that is, its real meaning – however,
is of a spiritual place in the heart that can only be entered by contemplation.
TAT7
There
can be no real progress in understanding how myths function until we understand
and allow metaphoric symbols to address, in their own unmodified way, the inner
levels of our consciousness. TAT7
…
The continuing confusion about the nature and function of metaphor is one of the
major obstacles – often placed in our path by organized religions that focus
shortsightedly on concrete times and places – to our capacity to experience
mystery. TAT 7
Mythology
may, in a real sense, be defined as other people’s religion.
And religion may, in a sense, be understood as a popular misunderstanding of
mythology. TAT8
Mythology
is a system of images that endows the mind and the sentiments with a sense of
participation in a field of meaning.
A system of mythological symbols only works if it operates in the field
of a community of people who have essentially analogous experiences, or to put
it another way, if they share the same realm of life experience.
How, in the contemporary period, can we evoke the imagery that
communicates the most profound and most richly developed sense of experiencing
life? These images must point past themselves to that
ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have
any one absolutely fixed meaning. These images must point
past all meanings given, beyond all definitions and relationships, to that
really ineffable mystery that is just the existence, the being of ourselves and
of our world. If we give that mystery an exact meaning we
diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet
carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one
knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of
definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that
allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of
definition. TAT 91
The fascination and vitality of myths and
fairy-tales lie
precisely in the fact that they depict basic forms of human experience.
For this very reason the same motifs are found the world over, not only
as the result of migration but also because the human
psyche which produces
them is everywhere the same. TGL – intro 37
Whenever a motif appears in such numerous repetitions or
modifications, it indicates, psychologically, that it is not understood in
consciousness,
and that it will therefore emerge in ever new forms in an effort to gain
attention. TGL 242