Jungian Archetypes of the Mythic Unconscious

 

Adapted from Edward. R. Edinger’s The Eternal Drama:  The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology. And Jung’s intro to Man and His Symbols

 

  • Read excerpt of 1st chapter:  What Is Mythology?

 

Cosmogony:  Myths of Creation

 

  • Several versions of how the cosmos came into existence (Bible has 2 books of Genesis, which tell somewhat different stories)
  • Simplest story:  Out of Chaos, the earth (Gaia) emerged and gave birth to the Sky (Uranus), and together they created their progeny.
  • Indicates that the creative act itself involves exposure to chaos.
  • Creation means that something new came into the world that didn’t previously exist.
  • Chaos is the womb of all things yet to be.
  • Nothing new can emerge until one is willing to reach into the chaos and pull it out.
  • Process of splitting/bifurcation then occurs.
  • Process of achieving consciousness involves a splitting into opposites.
  • Things can remain in a state of oneness only in the unconscious.
  • In consciousness, they must divide into opposites
  • Then we have the experience of conflict.
  • Consciousness (the tree of knowledge of good and evil) creates through a tension of opposites, the force of which keeps all dynamic systems activated and morphing, ever becoming new through this tension of opposites. 
  • Heraklitos, the pre-Socratic philosopher, posits that strife is the eternal creator.  All is always becoming.  Nothing ever truly is.  The logos sets it all in motion and gives birth to the order that emerges through chaos.  Thus, as Heriklitos so eloquently puts it, “One can never step twice into the same river.”  Not only is the river changed, but you are changed as well.
  • Plato also embraces this idea, but for him, the material/physical world is always in a state of flux.  For him, logos means quite the opposite of what it meant to Heraklitos (also spelled Heraclitus). To Plato's mind, Logos constitutes the world of Form where Truth expresses a state of immutable Oneness.
  • Carl Jung then takes this idea and broadens it to describe the “Collective Unconscious” that he considers the metastructure, or the architecture, of the psyche. This collective unconscious, Jung believes, is the mythic structure that provides the foundation of consciousness.  His writing explores how people from all times and all places share core myths that become the underpinnings of consciousness, culture, and communication.  For Jung, these archetypes comprise the mythic unconscious and express themselves in our dreams and in the stories we tell (think literature, fairytales, movies, news, etc.). Stories that have an archetypal structure strike a chord in our conscious lives as well as in our unconscious minds.

“We are the stories we hear and the stories we tell.”

  • Early mythology is peopled with kings paranoid about losing their power who feel compelled to destroy whomever threatens to usurp the throne, even if it means devouring their own offspring.  Likewise, many siblings compete for power, and in their efforts to seize power, demonstrate every sort of travesty imaginable.
  • Oppression always backfires ultimately, though.  It works in the beginning but soon becomes too much, and a hero emerges to right the wrong.

URANUS

  • Uranus imprisoned his children (The Titans and Cyclopes) because he felt they posed a threat. .
  • Cyclopes: giant race with one round eye; confined in the earth.
  • Titans: giant race overthrown by the Olympian gods.
  • Gaia is upset by their imprisonment and encourages her son Kronos to revolt against his father, Uranus.

KRONOS

  • Kronos waylays Uranus and castrates him.
  • The drops of blood that hit the earth become the Erinyes/the Furies.
  • The genitals that fell into the sea give birth to Aphrodite, goddess of love.
  • The Cyclopes’-- with their one round eye and burial beneath the earth-- represent a psychic aspect that has not yet split into doubleness.  The roundness suggests a certain primordial wholeness (repressed by Uranus).
  • Consequences of Uranus’s castration:  birth of desire (Aphrodite) and punishment (Furies).
  • Freud and the castration complex:  The son wants to supplant/overthrow the father and claim his power/authority.
  • This overthrow is necessary because power seeks to perpetuate itself and to eliminate all threats to its authority.  Parallel to the psyche, an age-old principle must be overthrown before growth and change can occur. (Remember culture-epoch theory?)
  • The newly emerging power must overcome the outmoded or oppressive power and, ironically, becomes the new oppressor with his own power issues, which will eventually cause him to abuse his authority and lead to his own overthrow.  This is the dialectic process at play once again:  The thesis is opposed by its antithesis, bringing about a synthesis of the two, which then becomes the new thesis, and on and on it goes (Socrates' dialectic method, Hegel’s historical dialectic, and the Communist Manifesto come to mind).
  • Kronos, when told by an oracle that one of his offspring would depose him, tried to circumvent the event and began to swallow all his children as a means of forestalling this doom.
  • ZEUS is the son of Kronos and Rhea.  Rhea tricked Kronos so that he wouldn't devour her newborn infant, Zeus. She replaced the baby with a stone, which Kronos then swallowed, thinking he'd done away with his son's potential usurpation of the royal power. Rhea then hid her son on the isle of Crete until he was strong enough to challenge his father. Ultimately, Zeus returned to overthrow his father and instituted a changing of the gods.  In Jungian depth psychology, this exemplifies how a whole dynasty of psychic authorities must eventually be overthrown by a new ruling class.
  • The devouring parent is an image universally encountered.  In this case, the oracle told the father that he would be overpowered by his son, so he takes drastic measures to avert that disaster.  However, as the Greeks tell us in myth after myth, story after story, the oracle’s truth will always come to pass—there’s no escaping it.  Fate will out, and as Jung says, “You meet your destiny on the path you take to escape it.”
  • Kronos, a Titan, was cast out in a war between the gods and the Titans.
  • Two other noteworthy Titans: Prometheus (literally means “forethought”) and Atlas.
  • Atlas’ punishment for losing the war was to hold up the Earth-- forever.
  • Titans became sacrifices for humanity’s well being.  In psychological terms, the archetypal contents that these meta-structures represent went into the service of the ego.
  • Prometheus, still rebelling against the pantheon of gods, sides with humanity and gives humans fire in the bargain.  (Remember that fire is the primordial technology that distinguishes humans from animals.  [You could argue that animals make art or that they experience love or even that they speak their own language, but animals never make fire.  Remember as well, that fire kindles our love affair with technology as the basis for our other creature comforts.]
  • Prometheus was assigned to supervise the separation of the sacrificial meat to determine which part should go to the gods and which part to humans.
  • Before this time, gods and humans had eaten together, so the myth goes, but now the new races of gods and humans eat separately.  Psychologically, this demonstrates the separation of the ego from its archetypal origins.
  • Prometheus deceives the gods by wrapping the bones and gristle into an enticing package of skin but leaves the nourishing meat for humans.
  • Zeus punishes humans for this duplicity by depriving them of fire, but Prometheus steals fire and is finally punished by being chained in the Caucasus Mountains where his liver will be eternally eaten away by a bird of prey each day (some say a vulture while others say it was Zeus’ eagle) only to have it grow back each night, and so forth and so on for all eternity.  Eternal recurrence…
  • This myth tells of the nature of the emerging consciousness: 
    • 1st there is the separation of what belongs to gods and what to humans—the ego gaining nourishment/energy for itself;
    • 2nd humans gain fire—light and energy:  consciousness and the effective energy of will to carry out conscious intention are thereby created.
    • The price to pay for this violation (because of the acquisition of consciousness, which occurred as a direct result of meat and fire/psychic nourishment and energy) is that by day (the time of light and consciousness), Prometheus suffers his eternal wound.  Therefore, consciousness can be seen as inflicting the wound, which means that Prometheus pays for human consciousness with his suffering (much like Christàa lot of ink has been spilled on this parallel).  For, Prometheus so loved the world that he sacrificed himself to promote human development.  Sound familiar?
  • As another tangent of this myth, Prometheus was also punished indirectly by the punishment meted out to his brother, Epimetheus (literally means “afterthought”), who received the gift of Pandora (or should I say the “booby prize”?)  Pandora literally means “gifts given by all the gods.”
  • Pandora myth:  Zeus took revenge on Prometheus by sending an evil which would counterbalance the benefits of the gift of fire.  He told Hephaistos, the craftsman god, to create a maiden, his most beautiful creation, a woman who would be invested with gifts from each and every god.  Athena taught her women’s work (Athena is goddess of weaving, wisdom, and war, and is tauted at the cleverest of all the gods); Aphrodite endowed her with beauty; Hermes gave her a deceitful nature; the Charities and the Horae adorned her with beautifully delicate clothing, flowers, and a golden crown.  Hermes, the messenger, took Pandora to Epimetheus as a gift.  Prometheus, still loving humans, locked away in a casket all the evils that might plague the world.  This was given to Pandora as a dowry.  Prometheus had warned Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from Zeus (beware of Greeks bearing gifts), but Epimetheus forgot and married Pandora.  Remembering too late his brother’s warning, he forbade Pandora to open the box.   One day her curiosity got the better of her and she opened it, releasing all the scourges to humankind.  Only hope remained.  Some say it was Prometheus who gave humans desire and wild hope.  The myth tells that before the arrival of woman/Pandora, men lived without evil and hardship.  With her coming, they fell from grace and have suffered ever since in a dangerous and unhappy world.
  • Pandora and fire are somewhat equivalent in that fire is energy and one of the aspects of energy is desire.  Pandora becomes the object of desire.  As the ego is given the powers of desire, will, and longing, it also receives the contents of Pandora’s box: the sufferings of human life. (Note the parallel to Adam & Eve).  Being born into ego consciousness is both blessing and curse, with joy and suffering going hand in hand.
  • As described in these myths, the unconscious state is paradise, and the expulsion from paradise (the archetypal primordial, undifferentiated unconscious, as represented by the creator gods and goddesses) is the equivalent of birth into the ego-conscious state wherein suffering and strife work to develop the individual Self (remember Heraklitos' idea of strife as the creative force).
  • Prometheus, then, becomes the consciousness-bringing principle itself.
  • In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Prometheus says that until his interference in the affairs of humankind, they wandered aimlessly, like children, without reason and with no purpose  “…until I taught them to discern the seasons by the rising and the obscure setting of the stars.  Numbers I invented for them, the chiefest of all discoveries; I taught them the grouping of letters, to be a memorial and record of the past, the mistress of the arts and mother of the Muses.   I first brought under the yoke beasts of burden, who by draft and carrying relieved men of their hardest labors; I yoked the proud horse to the chariot, teaching him obedience to the reigns, to be the adornment of wealth and luxury.  I too contrived for sailors sea-faring vessels with their flaxen wings….”  He also gave them divination, medicine, metallurgy; in short, all the human arts are from Prometheus.
  • Mythic parallels can be found in Greek, Hebrew, and Christian stories.
  • There is an advocate in the archetypal realm, whether it be Prometheus, Christ, or Isaiah to assist the ego in overcoming the isolation and suffering.
  • Two main aspects of the psychological meaning: 
    • 1)  consciousness is accompanied by suffering
    • 2)  the ego doesn’t have to do all the suffering alone. 

 

 

CHAPTER 3:  OLYMPIAN GODS

 

  • Early civilized minds took it as self-evident that there were beings who were immortal and were fundamental, guiding sources and presences.
  • In psychological terms, they can be seen as inhabitants of the collective unconscious, which are, in turn, expressions of the archetypes.
  • Archetypes are the psychic entities that continue to exist unchanging and unchanged while the momentary individual egos come and go.  (Plato’s physical world of becoming and the spiritual world of Being come to mind.  Plato also speaks of a connected consciousness that interpenetrates all human psyches, and he therefore contends that all knowledge is merely a re-collection of what we already know and have know since the birth of our individual souls from the womb of the original source/Form.)
  • Archetypes are the fingerprints of what Jung calls the collective unconscious.  They form the deep structures of the mythic psyche (Greek word that literally means, “the breath of life”).  He argues that these mythic structures/archetypes keep us all connected to primal symbols and memories.
  • Historical experiences that illustrate some basic and universal feature of the human psyche turn into myth, so there is, in a certain sense, an interchange between history and myth.
  • Individual egos live out historical processes whereas archetypal images exist in a mythological dimension that penetrates, permeates, and transcends all individuals at all times in all places.  This psychic bond is based on archetypal images and symbols.
  • These mythic structures then unify all humankind in a primal knowledge whose truths are revealed in the highly interpretive language of symbol and image.  These mythic forms are the ever-veiled and eternally revealed wisdom of the collective unconscious… the interpersonal, transpersonal, collectively shared psyche.  (Think:  Plato’s “Ideal Form”).
  • The collective unconscious, in essence, bonds single cells into one organism whose whole is more than the sum of its parts.  All peoples at all times have shared identical images in dreams and stories and spirituality.  The details differ, but the story remains the same.  (The Virgin birth, for example, or the holy trinity/triple goddess are common to many religious traditions.)
  • Iliad gods and humans are active on the same stage.  Literally, gods and humans were both bodily present on the battlefield.  Gods pick their favorites, as well, and then fight one another vicariously through these “heroes.”
  • In psychological sense, we can take this interplay between humans and gods to be the interpenetration between ego experience and archetypal factors signified by the gods.  In other words, the nature of psychological experience is that our actions and experiences are constantly shaped and supported by archetypal urges and powers.
  • Numbers can also be symbolic.  Plato and Pythagoras and Einstein agreed that number is the highest possible expression of truth. 
  •  Today’s philosophy is brought to you by the number 12.  12 Olympian gods, the pantheon (“pan”=all, “theo”=gods); 12 hours of day & 12 hours of night; 12 tribes of Israel; 12 apostles of Christ; 12 signs of the zodiad; 12 labors of Heracles.
  • 12 is related to the symbolism of wholeness, to the mandala and the quaternity, and is often associated with sacredness.
  • As the ego looks in the direction of the Self, the transpersonal center of the psyche, it tends to experience the Self not as a unity (at least not at first) but as a multiplicity of archetypal factors that one can think of as being represented by the Greek gods.
  • Seen as one unity:  the pantheon.  From the viewpoint of depth psychology, the gods stand for the archetypes, the basic patterns within the human psyche that exist independent of personal experience. We all have all of them present, and it is in our best interest to honor all of them at appropriate times and in any given situation because without this balance we run the risk of overidentification with one element and thereby do violence to all the others. In turn, this sort of extremism throws our psyche out of whack and we can only see one facet of ourselves and the world.
  • Hubris is a Greek word which is usually translated as "overweening pride" or "the pride that goeth before a fall" and comes from a verb meaning "to do violence to the gods." It is hubris that ultimately brings about the fall of Greek heroes because their arrogance insults the gods and disrespects their turf. There are lots of myths that deal with this theme and many that show what happens to people who worship only one of the gods to the exclusion of the others. Balance for the Greeks is key to happiness and harmony.
  • The gods/archetypes are templates on which the individual life is formed.  Mythologically, these eternal patterns are thought of as gods, existing in a special place apart from ordinary human experience (whether it be heaven, Mount Olympus, or the sacred mountain).  Whatever the identification or description is ascribed to this “special place apart,” it remains a realm beyond the personal.
  • Yahweh (YHVH) in Hebrew mythology:  a sky god who inhabited Mount Sinai, which was quite similar to Mount Olympus as well as the heaven of Christians and Muslims alike.
  • The abode of the gods generally has a perfect, eternal, untarnished quality (i.e., streets of gold).
  • Psychologically, the Olympian realm is a projection onto the outer world of an inner state—a state that is eternal, unchanging, and a realm of spirit as opposed to matter.
  • Olympian existence emphasized the misery of mortality. 
  • There exists an eternal psyche (or something symbolized by an eternal psyche) that is of greater duration than the ego.
  • For Jung, the collective unconscious is analogous to the abode of the archetypes/gods.  In his purely psychological views, the heavenly realm of the Greek gods is seen as apart of the human psyche, which is beyond time and space and beyond the control of the conscious personality.
  • The Olympian gods, then, can be understood as translations of psychological realities into externalized realities.
  • The twelve gods chart the eternal or impersonal dimension of the psyche.  The Greek pantheon forms a set of archetypal principles, and we can thus talk about an Aphrodite principle, a Zeus principle, an Ares principle, etc.  (much the same as Nietzsche delineates in his discussion of the Dionysian and Apollonian principles in his essay, “The Birth of Tragedy”)
  • We observe and experience these principles in different ways, but they provide us a means of making meaning.  Without these unifying principles, we could never hope to communicate.  (Keep in mind that one of the major distinctions between humans and animals is that humans are capable of symbolic thought.)
  • We observe these archetypes and principles in others, recognize them in ourselves (if we are at all self-reflective), and encounter them in our dreams.
  • The closer we come to approaching our individual state of wholeness (what Jung calls individuation), the more likely we are to have had at least brief encounters with most, if not all, of these divine principles, for all humans contain within themselves these deeply imbedded psychic structures; we all contain within our psyche traits analogous to the Olympian Pantheon.

 

The Greek Pantheon:  a holy trinity & paternal authority principle—>Zeus + Poseidon + Hades

 

ZEUS=  The ultimate authority ruling over the three-fold paternal authority principle, made up of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades—who can be seen as different manifestations of the same basic principle).

  • Sky god, supreme deity, comes closest of all the members of the Pantheon to embodying the whole Self, even though he represents only the masculine side.
  • Associated with wind, rain, thunder, lightning, Zeus is master of spiritual phenomena since the spirit world is signified by the sky and the will of the gods by the manifestations of the weather.
  • Zeus is divine agent of justice and judgment, embodiment of law, punisher of transgressions (hurling thunderbolts)
  • Zeus personifies creative energy, which sought to fertilize/impregnate (through rape when he met resistance), and sought conquest after conquest.  An energy continually striving to realize new consciousness and new fruits of itself.
  • Hera, his wife and sister, jealous of his numerous love affairs with mortal women, fiercely opposed him, exacting revenge on the women he had sex with.  She’s the feminine embodiment of the Self.  She teaches women the same lesson the gods teach heroes and villains alike:  when you overstep the boundaries between human and divine realms, whether as the perpetrator or the victim, there’s hell to pay!
  • Every gain of the ego must be paid for by punishment for having appropriated the divine energy.  This psychological fact is seen time and again in the consequences meted out to Zeus’ mortal sex partners.
  • The same archetypal dynamic can also be seen in the union of the divine and the human that occurs in the Christian world: the Annunciation, or the announcement by the Holy Ghost to Mary that she was pregnant.
  • Zeus and Hera are counterbalancing, married opposites that function in an eternal reconciliation of tensions:  Zeus’ role is to create, to generate as many offspring as possible by as many different mothers as possible; Hera’s role is to resent it and attempt to frustrate and punish individuals who succumb to Zeus’ desires.  Note the parallel in the book of Job where Yahweh is divided against himself, the other part of him appears as Satan.
  • Here you can see the ambiguity in the world of archetypes.  Value neutral, the archetypes are not interested in the comfort and well-being of the human ego but are more interested in something beyond the individual’s ability to value or understand.
  • Imagery of Zeus strikes a strong parallel to the first hexagram of the I Ching (the ancient Chinese oracle).  Zeus embodies pure yang energy-- primal creative power, which is light-giving, active, strong--whose essence is the power of energy and whose image is heaven.
  • As this principle appears psychologically, it can be seen as masculine, self-righteous, moral authority, vengeful of transgressions.  If a person falls into unconscious identification with this power principle, he will find himself acting and reacting as though he himself were the Law, the ultimate authority.  On the other hand, making an objective connection/association with this principle rather than falling into identification with it, can lead to the capacity for objective judgment and appraisal. The way these archetypal powers manifest in our psychology is a matter of degree and balance. The key is to recognize and utilize them without establishing an all-consuming, fixating overidentification with that particular element or principle. (Aristotle calls this the "Golden Mean" and Greeks such as Pythagoras express this idea mathematically as the Pythagorean rectangle or the golden spiral. This mathematical expression is seen everywhere in nature and can be seen as the archetypal balancing act of the universe.)
  • Zeus is the personification of law and judgment, suggesting that human principles of law and justice arise from deep within the psyche.

 

POSEIDON—brother of Zeus, also an authority principle, but signifies authority from below rather than from above.  Lord of the sea but has dominion over the earth.  Poseidon the earth-shaker brings earthquakes and tidal waves.

  • Poseidon, ruler of the sea, is an earthy version of Zeus; manifested from either the unconscious depths of our psyche or from outer circumstance. 
  • Felt in the earthly impact of concrete life events beyond one’s control.  Embodiment of the urge for retribution.
  • I Ching parallel:  hexagram 51—The Arousing (Shock, thunder)=the Poseidon principle.  Yang line develops below 2 yin lines and presses upward forcibly.  This movement is so violent that it arouses terror.  It is symbolized by thunder, which bursts forth from the earth and by its shock causes fear and trembling.  This is the inner earthquake of fear that imbues a reverence for god.  The superior man is always filled with reverence at the manifestation of god; he sets his life in order and searches his heart so that people will not harbor any secret opposition to the will of god.
  • When life events shake your emotional or psychological foundations, dreams may include images of storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves, which serve to activate this principle.
  • The Poseidon personality would have some similarities to the Zeus personality, but this authority and effectiveness would be more apt to manifest in terms of concrete power—political and economic—as opposed to intellectual or spiritual power.

 

HADES—lord of the underworld & 3rd aspect of the triad authority principle. 

  • Shares with Hermes the role of leading one into the unconscious, the Underworld (psychopomp).
  • Practically the only myth associated with him is his abduction of Persephone, Demeter’s daughter and his absconding with her into the realm of the dead.
  • In later imagery, he becomes the personification of death.
  • A.K.A. Pluto, a name that associates him with riches.
  • Hades, in inner terms, was thought of as the lord of the nekyia (journey to the Underworld), and so was thought of as the ruler of the phenomenon of death and rebirth, the function he served in the Demeter-Persephone story.  (Think about how creation and destruction, life and death and rebirth happen throughout your life.  You must die to the old in order to be born again into the new.  Once again, remember culture-epoch theory.)
    APOLLO—attributes:  sun, light, clarity, truty.  Son of Zeus and Leto.
  • Represents the principle of rational consciousness, which many times in numerous positive and heroic figures, has difficulty being born.
  • The myth of Apollo’s birth shows how the divine can come into being in the human realm.  No firmly established ego will grant it refuge but is allowed in where there is a more tenuous consciousness, a floating existence, which then allows it to take root and become permanently established.  (The artistic personality.)
  • Some say Leto, Apollo’s mother, was Zeus’s kinder and gentler wife before he married Hera.   Others say Leto was one of his “other women” with whom he carried on.  Either way, the myth has it that Hera, furious about Leto's pregnancy, sent the serpent Python to pursue her and ordered that no place on earth where the sun shone should receive Leto for the birth.  Leto  was rejected by heaven, earth, and sea.  In one version of this myth, the South wind, Zephyr, carried her to a tiny island in the Cyclades islands in the Aegean Sea where she gave birth to twins on a floating island that belonged to neither land, nor air, nor sea.  In a cave on the island of Delos, she had her children.  At Apollo’s birth, the island became rooted.  This is said to have been one of Apollo’s favorite shrines, and legend has it that as a means of keeping this site sacred to Apollo, no one was allowed to give birth or pass away into death on the island.
  • Apollo killed the Python of Delphi and took over that oracle, becoming the vanquisher of unconscious terrors.
  • Golden-haired like the sun, Apollo shoots arrows of insight &/or death; he is god of music and the lyre.  Healing belongs to his realm, and he is the father of Asclepius, the god of medicine.
  • Muses are part of his retinue—music, history, drama, poetry, dance, creative arts, all belong to him.  Muses are called on to invoke the artistic, creative imagination to give helpful guidance and imagery.
  • Power and virtue of consciousness and capacity for truth.  The opposite would be the darker, Dionysian side.
  • In inner experience, dreams that emphasize light/illumination refer to the Apollo principle.

HERMES:  generally portrayed with wings on his head and winged sandals.

  • Divine messenger analogous to angels (“angelos” is the Greek word for messenger).
  • Moves with the wind
  • God of revelation, bringer of dreams, guide of the dark way, psychopomp (leader of souls to the underworld).
  • Depicted in art as the good shepherd, caring for the sheep/human souls.  The later image of Christ as the good shepherd derives from this image of Hermes
  • Aristophanes (the Greek comic playwright) calls Hermes the friendliest of gods to men.
  • In ancient Greece, Hermes was the god of boundaries.  “Herm” is a name for a pile of stones marking a boundary, but later became a phallic marking (huge penises) to guard thresholds of buildings.
  • Hermes transcends boundaries; god of travelers, patron saint of merchants; patron saint of thieves (because, as myth would have it, on the first day after his birth, he stole Apollo’s cattle, thus transgressing the boundary between mine and yours). 
  • The Hermetic principle can deceive the Apollonian principle since Hermes need not always tell the truth; Hermes can be false, ambiguous, and cunning.
  • Hermes is a magician with a magic wand; mediator between human and divine affairs.
  • In psychological terms, he is the mediator between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
  • He is helper of heroes, a guide to secret regions.
  • Hermeneutics is the science of the interpretation of the scriptures, extracting the hidden meaning.
  • He is the patron deity of depth psychology because depth psychology seeks to relate consciousness to the unconscious depths and create a workable interchange between the two psychic structures.
  • Ancient Greeks used to say that when a silence fell on a group, Hermes had come in to tap another dimension.
  • Considered the maker of synchronicity, bringer of unexpected coincidences, happenings that cannot be rationally explained.
  • Hermes personalities are guided by an interest in the hidden, are carriers of secret lore and things hidden beneath the surface appearance.  They tend to expose the symbolic and dark, transcend the ordinary boundaries of human understanding.
  • Falling into identification with the Hermetic principle means that someone will compulsively point out his or her interpretations and will feel obliged to point out hidden references, generally becoming quite a nuisance.
  • As the Hermetic principle is encountered internally, it can serve as an objective inner guide to the unconscious (Virgil was Dante’s Hermes, his psychopomp through the Underworld).
  • In dreams, winged beings associated with the wind carry a mediating spirit and have one foot in each world.  These are the guides between the two realms of the human and divine, the conscious and unconscious.
  • ARES:  god of war, strife, fighting.  His sister Eris was the goddess of discord.
  • Ares principle is aggressive energy.
  • Aphrodite’s lover.
  • Psychological manifestations of the Ares principle would be aggression, dispute, combativeness enjoyed for their own sake.
  • The Ares personality loves to fight for the sake of argument and feels most alive when engaged in battle or confrontation.
  • Embodies courage, aggressive self-assertion.   Professional soldiers, athletes, trial lawyers, etc. fall into identification with this principle.
  • As an inner experience, the Ares principle emerges in situations where aggressive energy is required.  This spirit can have its good side effects, in that a certain willingness to fight one’s way out of original containment or out of original collective identity is a requirement for psychological development.
  • In Homer, Ares is prayed to as bringer of peace, which is archetypally sound.  Unless we have relation to the principle, we will fall victim to its negative manifestation.  If we could not summon up aggressive energy when appropriate, we will succumb to it in other ways, such as falling victim to others’ aggression or to our own autonomous assertive energy that can destroy by emerging at an inappropriate time.  (See Fight Club)
  • HEPHAISTOS:  blacksmith of the gods; master of fire; metallurgist; craftsmen.         
  • Son of a single parent, as was Athena, and was rejected at birth by his mother, Hera, because of his ugliness and lameness.
  • He was thrown out of heaven, down to earth (note parallel to Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost).
  • Only god who has a major relation to the earth, which became his realm--signifies divine power descending to earth and connects with earthly reality.
  • Foreshadows the incarnation image of god becoming human.
  • Worker in concrete reality, earthbound, and therefore stands for the archetypal factor that operates within the personal and concrete.
  • Inventor of useful, cunning, and beautiful devices; creative artist.
  • He represents creativity that develops out of defect or need ("Necessity is the mother of invention.")
  • Only manifestation of physical imperfection in the Olympian realm of perfect specimens.
  • Identification enhanced/facilitated because of human imperfection.
  • Psychologically, this indicates that an archetypal power has entered into personal reality and has brought the creative principle to the earthly realm.
  • Suggests that creativity is born out of a sense of defectiveness or inadequacy that requires extraordinary effort as its consequence.
  • Hephaistos principle breaks into 2 streams:
    • artist & craftsman—the artistic principle emphasizing beauty;
    • engineer & mechanic—emphasizing utility.
  • Alchemists combined the Hermetic principle and the Hephaistos principle because they were dealing simultaneously with symbolic, philosophic matters (the Hermetic aspect), and as they labored over their fires with concrete material, they tapped into the Hephaistos aspect.
  • Hephaistos personality is found particularly in artists and craftsmen, people who like to work with their hands, with earthy, concrete manifestations: occupational therapy, practical, empirical functioning, and craftsmanship of every sort.
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  • OLYMPIAN GODS:ZEUS, POSEIDON, HADES= brothers forming the authority principle; APOLLO, HERMES, ARES, HEPHAISTOS= four principles of masculine psychological functioning.
  • OLYMPIAN GODDESSES: HERA, HESTIA, (DEMETER), APHRODITE, ATHENA, ATEMIS
  • HERA= wife and sister of Zeus and his equal in power, queen of heaven, embodiment of the feminine aspect of the Self, goddess of wifehood, motherhood, and the rights and power of women.
  • Most of the myths about Hera focus on her jealousy as an outraged and betrayed spouse.
  • Keep in mind that Greek myths were a product of the masculine psyche, and all goddesses must be considered from that point of reference.
  • Even so, as much power and effectiveness adhere to the feminine principle as they do to the masculine. (yin/yang are interdependent)
  • Zeus must always take Hera into account.
  • Hera also carries a grudge toward certain human heroes, particularly Heracles and Aeneas; however, her combativeness generally has the effect of bringing them to the peak of their power as a means of rebellion and resistance.
  • Even though a myth may couch things in negative circumstances, the net result is many times a positive development.
  • The marriage quarrels between these two represent the tensions and conflict between masculine and feminine principles; it also shows that the masculine principle is not omnipotent and must be challenged by its opposite. (yin/yang yet again)
  • Hera types are regal, aristocratic, born-to-command, assumes the right to be in charge.
  • Hera principle internally means to make contact with the inner feminine as an authority to be served, which for a woman is her core experience.
  •   In a man’s psychology, Hera represents the authoritarian aspect of the mother complex, against which the masculine ego must establish itself.
  • Is the counterbalancing of the masculine logos principle
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  • HESTIA:  goddess of the sacred hearth, both of the home and of the nation. She drew more attention in Roman culture than in Greek (called her Vesta).
  • Personified the glowing fire on the family hearth, the natural center of the family and of gatherings of family or clan.
  • The domestic hearth was also the sacrificial altar and Hestia was mentioned first and last in every sacrificial ceremony.
  • Signifies sacredness of being centered, rooted, and contained in a collective group and in a particular region, a local soil.
  • Vestal Virgins in Rome fed an eternal flame honoring sacred loyalty to family, tribe, city, and nation.
  • Associated with home, nativeness, hearth, patriotism, nostalgia for place.
  • Embodies the “geographical soul,” an aspect of the psyche that has been determined by the geography/culture out of which one is born.  The place that the soul identifies with most.
  • One cannot worship at the hearth of the human family until one has first worshipped at the hearth of one’s particular locality.
  • For the larger and more comprehensive viewpoint to be authentic, it must be based on a solid relation to one’s particular origins; otherwise, the group can be nothing more than the source of alienation.
  • DEMETER:  earth mother, embodiment of agriculture, specifically grain.
  • An entire myth and cult associated with her grew into the Eleusinian mysteries.
  • Embodiment of the nourishing mother, one of the chief archetypal images.
  • In clinical psychology, the nourishing mother is a double image:  implies a mother giving nourishment and an infant receiving it + shift to devouring mother, reversing the process with the mother being fed rather than the infant.
  • Any woman too powerfully identified with Demeter who has a compulsive need to nourish, ultimately becomes the devouring mother since her insistence on feeding and caretaking, whether it is needed or not, causes her offspring to remain infantile and their potential for growth injured or completely denied.  The mother who must herself be fed by her children’s dependence on her, in essence, devours their potential for individual growth and development.
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  • ARTEMIS:  (Roman Diana) associated with the moon, twin sister of Apollo, the sun; goddess of the forest and the hunt, archer who carried a silver bow (like Apollo); virgin goddess; brought health and well-being to virginal maidens; protectress of childbirth.
  • Cold, chaste, quick to be offended by men.
  • Lady of the beasts, valuing wild nature more than human feelings and relationships
  • Myth of Actaeon: Actaeon saw Artemis in the forest and watched her bathe.  Feeling violated by this voyeurism, Artemis turned him into a stag who was then hunted and torn apart by his own dogs. 
  • This myth implies that Actaeon ran afoul of his own instincts, his ego not up to such an awesome encounter with a deity.  (It is always dangerous to stumble over such transpersonal energies unexpectedly, or when the ego is unprepared.)
  • Apollo was jealous of Artemis’ love for Orion, a great hunter, so when Orion was swimming in the ocean one day, Apollo challenged Artemis’ competiveness by getting her to hit that speck in the ocean with her bow and arrow.  She thus killed Orion.
  • This pictures how relationships can be destroyed in the Artemis woman because of the jealousy of the spiritual animus (the masculine principle in the female).  It is as if the Artemis woman has a partner built into her own psyche, which wants no competition from the human realm.
  • Artemis women tend to be efficient, self-sufficient, and not amenable to personal intimacy.
  • As an inner experience, the Artemis principle appears as an attitude that is coldly factual and impersonal and can be as aloof and indifferent as natrue.
  •   The inner Artemis experience will be felt as cruel because it is indifferent to personal human feeling and is harsh toward weakness and regressive tendencies.
  • Artemis woman is devoid of sentimentality in contrast to Demeter, who tends to be sentimental and protective.
  • In women, Artemis embodies the “survival of the fittest” principle; in men, we might call her the natural anima (the feminine principle of the male psyche).
  • Artemis woman can be cruel to weakness but helpful to strength, and so this principle is growth-promoting to those for whom growth is possible; she will be hated by the regressive aspect of humanity.
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  • APHRODITE:  goddess of love and beauty; her son is Eros, who arouses passion by shooting arrows at his victims. 
  • The 3 Graces are associated with Aphrodite, whose qualities are grace, seductive desire, charm, and the power of the pleasure principle.
  • There are many hazards in her realm.
  • One should be in good relation with the Ares principle of aggression when encountering Aphrodite.
  • Entanglement with her can be dangerous, but so too can scorning her. Love's just like that!
  • Hippolytus, who was a devotee of Artemis, so valued chastity that he refused Love.  For this slight, Aphrodite cast a spell over his stepmother Phaedra and caused her to fall passionately in love with him.  Phaedra tried to seduce him, but when he rejected her, she told her husband, Theseus, that Hippolytus had raped her.  Theseus prayed to Poseidon for revenge, and Hippolytus was dragged to his death by his own horses when Poseidon’s bull from the sea frightened them.
  • Aphrodite takes her vengeance against anyone who has rejected her by involving him in some perverse erotic situation.
  • It can also be dangerous to pick her over other goddesses as Paris did when he declared Aphrodite more beautiful than either Hera or Athena, which led to the Trojan War.
  • This dissention between the gods and goddesses demonstrates that there is no easy way to negotiate the process of psychological development.
  • As long as the archetypal powers themselves are divided, the ego is cast in a tragic role, split by the conflict that exists in the "divine realm."
  • As long as there are multiple principles that have not achieved a decisive unity, life is essentially tragic. Arrogance or foolishness or recklessness will all lead to downfall and are generally the by-product of overly identifying with one principle to the exclusion of all others, thereby upending the natural balance. (Whatever is rejected/suppressed will eventually bubble up with a vengeance.)
  • It is only with the unification symbolized by monotheism and psychologically represented by the Self that there is a chance to overcome this essential tragedy.
  • It is extremely dangerous to equate a woman’s beauty with Aphrodite’s because some heinous fate awaits those who fall prey to all-consuming pride (hubris).
  • Psychologically, this means that beauty and its capacity to engender desire must not be identified with but must be recognized as a divine dynamism.  To presume that beauty belongs to oneself is to identify with Aphrodite or to challenge her divinity.
  • Pygmalion myth: 
  • A sculptor who fell in love with the ivory statue he'd carved prayed to Aphrodite to bring the statue of this beautiful woman to life. Aphrodite answered the prayer (Aphrodite is identifiable here as the ultimate life-giving principle,) and reveals what can happen to the imagery of the inner world if one pours enough energy into it and bathes it in Love’s light. Love as the ultimate life engendering/affirming principle.
  • Aphrodite is sometimes hailed as the basic cosmogonic principle, the very source of life itself. (In Greek "cosmos" means "order")
  • The symbolism of Aphrodite overlaps with that of the Holy Ghost.  They share the symbol of the dove.
  • In alchemical symbolism, there is a term, “blessed greenness,” which refers to Aphrodite and her life-giving capacities on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritually conceiving power of the Holy Ghost which was thought of as the color green and can be equated with the vegetation spirit belonging to the life principle of Aphrodite.  (Green in Islam also symbolizes Allah’s life giving properties.)
  • The Aphrodite woman is easily recognizable in today’s culture.  She functions through the properties of charm, appeal, and the ability and willingness to give pleasure to convey subtle, flattering attention.
  •   For women who identify too strongly with the Aphrodite function, it is as if the archetypal function lives through her and she becomes its helpless slave.
  • The independent Artemis function can be balanced by some of Aphrodite’s warmth and charm, and the Aphrodite function can be buffered by a bit of Artemis’ self-sufficiency.
  • The subjective or inner component of Aphrodite can be seen in an introverted or an extraverted way: Internally, it could mean the ability to relate to beauty.  Externally, it would encompass the whole principle of Eros, the willingness to connect with and to be considerate of the other.
  • The Aphrodite principle provides us with the ability to make life-enhancing connections with others.
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  • ATHENA: 
  • chief deity of Athens; once a fertility goddess, she is usurped by the Athenians and virginized; goddess of weaving, war, and wisdom; cleverest of all the gods and goddesses; patroness of heroes such as Odysseus.
  • Born out of the head of Zeus.  As the myth goes, Zeus swallowed Metis (literally means “wise counsel based on a cunning intelligence”), his first wife when she was pregnant with Athena.  (Metis was one of the Titans, daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, and was the one who counseled Zeus to mix mustard and salt into a honeyed drink and feed it to Cronus to make him vomit out Zeus’ other siblings whom he had swallowed.  She is the personification of Prudence and Insight, and Zeus claimed that after ingesting her, she gave him wise counsel from within.) The oracle told Zeus that Metis’ first child would be a girl and that if she had another it would be a son who would then overthrow Zeus.  So, he swallowed her, and one day while walking beside Lake Triton, he was overcome by an agonizing headache.  Prometheus, or some say Hephaisots, split his head open with an axe and Athena leaped forth in full armor.He then gave birth to her himself.
  • Symbolizes the feminine content that is oriented toward the masculine and particularly helpful to it.
  • Athena principle brings about civilization.
  • Introduced the plow and olive tree, the supposed origins of civilized living.
  • Helmeted, she is the warrior goddess, but in terms of strategy not violence.
  • Bringer of practical knowledge; quality of wisdom.
  • Bringer of wise counsel and victory.
  • Psychologically, Athena women (who are also familiar to us these days) put primary emphasis on spirit and intelligence; companion and adviser to men, often without erotic involvement; positive relation to the father and a questionable relation to the mother; skilled at building bridges between a man’s mind and his feelings; she meets him more than halfway.
  • Taken as an inner principle, an aspect of a man’s psyche, she represents the feminine figure of wisdom, “Sophia”, the highest manifestation of the anima, the inner spiritual guide, even more developed than the purely spiritual image of the heavenly Mary.
  • An image of woman that can relate a man to his depths in a profound and comprehensive way. 
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  • HEROES
  • Can be thought of as a dynamism toward a certain kind of psychological achievement or service; the personification of the urge to individuation.
  • Linked both to the Self and to the ego but is neither Self nor ego/
  • An expression of the Self/the greater personality, but the conscious ego must relate to this urge and act on it to bring it into reality.
  • Thus, hero is more than the ego and less than the Self.
  • Important for the ego not to identify itself with the hero figure, although most youths tend to do so and to overestimate the ego’s power (Icarus and invincibility).
  • Jung’s definition of the term “individuation”:
    • “In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct fromt the general, collective psychology.  Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.”
    • “…characterized by a peculiar, and in some respects unique psychology.  The peculiar character of the individual psyche appears less in its elements than in its complex formations.  The psychological individual … has an a priori unconscious existence, but exists consciously only in so far as a consciousness of his peculiar nature is present, i.e., so far as there exists a conscious distinction from other individuals.”
  • Individuation and the growth of consciousness, then, go hand in hand
  • Therefore, since consciousness is particular to each individual, there is no “collective consciousness."