underwent a not-so-subtle shift as it moved from being a negative method that rejected the historicity of religious stories to a positive method of exalting particular religious stories for their cultural value. The odd thing about this transition was that it still basically associated “myth” with nonbiblical religion, although it was now held to be good rather than bad. Few people considered that there might be more similarity than difference between the miraculous stories of the Bible and the stories of other religious traditions.
Psychological Interpretations of Myth: Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell
Today, many people who have overcome the scientifically motivated denigration of myth as “false history” have come to appreciate it not as a source of political or racist ideology but as an expression of a healthy psychological need for stories that define our identities and values. This development can be traced in part to Carl Jung (1875–1961), who as a psychologist departed from Freud’s ideological critique of religion as he came to see its positive benefits. He believed that mythology utilized a series of universal, archetypal figures (e.g., the wise old woman, the brave hero, the mother goddess) that reappear in stories around the world, expressing the experience of the “collective unconscious” of humanity.4 Whereas Freud believed that individuals suppress details of their personal histories, which then emerge in the activity of the individual’s unconscious (e.g., in dreams), Jung believed that there are many symbols in consciousness that cannot be explained simply as a result of the individual’s history. For this reason, he asserted the existence of a “collective unconscious” that preexists all individuals and societies and so has the character of an a priori part of human nature. This approach is in effect an attempt to overcome Freud’s reductionist view of religion by admitting that it refers to something bigger than the individual psyche and its neuroses.
But Jung’s understanding of religion still has reductionist elements to it. Although the collective unconscious and its archetypes transcend individuals, they are still understood through psychological categories that confine religion to an internal experience—albeit an internal experience of our species as a whole. Although myths may seem to be about external realities, they are in fact “symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche . . . mirrored in the events of nature.”5 Even the story of Jesus is ultimately not about a historical individual so much as it is the exemplification of a psychological archetype.6 Jesus represents the fully integrated “Self,” the ideal of the mature and “whole” person we all seek to be; the details of his external historical life are unimportant to Jung, for Jesus is only of real importance as he exists in the inner religious experiences of believers who encounter him as an archetypal ideal. He serves as a means to our own realization of complete selfhood, so his existence independent of us is irrelevant. “The self of Christ is present in everybody a priori,” although in unconscious form, so it can only become real to us “when you withdraw your projections from an outward historical or metaphysical Christ and thus wake up the Christ within.”7
Jung has also been accused of basically reducing God to an element of consciousness, an accusation he attempted to refute by invoking the Kantian philosophical distinction between things as they truly are (“things in themselves,” or noumena) and things as we experience and know them (phenomena). We can only know the archetypes as we know them as objects of consciousness (phenomena), and this applies to God as much as any other archetype. But Jung holds that this does not mean that God only exists within our minds, for we can know nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God independent of us (as noumenon)—therefore, he argued, we cannot reduce God to a by-product of consciousness as Freud did.8
This argument, however, does not completely refute the charge that Jung has reduced religion and God to internal psychological realities. Although he allows for the possibility of a transcendent God, he also asserts that we can know nothing about this God (not even whether it exists independently of us), so God’s external existence is basically as irrelevant as the external historical existence of Jesus. What Jung says about God is entirely shaped by his psychological categories and his understanding of how they apply to God—for example, how God mirrors all aspects of human consciousness by modeling for us the integrated “Self,” as well as the male and female aspects of it (Animus and Anima) and its Shadow side.9
Jung’s approach remains a popular one in many circles and has been used by some scholars to analyze the mythological symbols in cinema, especially science-fiction films.10 It is my intention not to suggest that these studies are illegitimate but to indicate that such a Jungian approach to myth is limited in its focus due to its reductionist tendencies. This approach imposes general psychological categories on all cultures, insisting that the details of the individual myths are less important than their conformity to archetypal psychological patterns, alleged (without real evidence) to be universal in all cultures. Because myths are understood to be representative of the struggle for integrated wholeness or “individuation,” they tend to be seen as a function of this unconscious drive for self-discovery rather than, for example, an attempt to deal with the external encroachment of chaos on our lives (which Geertz identified as the fundamental task of religion). In Jung’s view, myths help us each embrace and integrate our own Self in all its aspects (Shadow, Anima, and Animus), but this is basically understood as an internal struggle rather than one that is related to our lives in our communities and world.
The approach of Joseph Campbell, who made use of Jung’s ideas, illustrates these problems even more clearly. Campbell probably did more to popularize mythology than any other modern scholar, thanks in part to Bill Moyers’s television series on him. Few people realize, however, the biases built into his approach. More so than Jung, Campbell simplified the nature and diversity of mythology by insisting that there really is only one myth (the “monomyth”), endlessly reproduced in cultures across the world, which exists as a model for the human journey of self-discovery. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell describes the structure of this myth as including a series of characteristic events: The hero is called to the adventure/quest. He initially refuses the call. He is convinced to go with the help of a figure who gives him supernatural aid. He passes the threshold of home and must survive combat with the monster. He enters the “belly of the whale” and is symbolically killed and reborn. He passes through a series of ordeals and tests of his character. He rescues the mother goddess. He is reconciled to his father. He destroys the monster and is united with the divine.11 Not all myths conform to this pattern, but Campbell works hard to make it seem as if they do, emphasizing those features that seem to fit and ignoring those that do not.12 He seems to have been influenced here by his early studies of medieval European literature, with its stories of chivalric romance, heroic knights battling dragons, and damsels in distress, so that he desired to find this the universal structure for all myths. He also claims that this myth is really about an internal struggle within ourselves, rather than any struggle with external realities, to a greater extent than Jung. He even belittles the problem of external suffering, claiming that the only problem exists within ourselves in our inability to deal with it; we deserve everything that happens to us, for (in an existentialist sense) we make our own universe.13 We can decide whether to suffer or not, in other words, so it does not really matter what goes on outside of our heads.
This complete reduction of the subject of myth to our internal psychological universe is abetted by Campbell’s philosophical monism, his belief that all reality is one and that there is ultimately no distinction between ourselves and the divine; this allows him to reduce all our experience of the world to an internal psychological matter. In his monism, it is not a transcendent reality with which we unite (as in Vedantic Hinduism), but rather all reality is reinterpreted as an aspect of the self, as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy: the individual realizes he himself is the absolute, the creator, the center of his own universe.14 Campbell also rejects any resistance to this monism in the history of religion, such as the insistence of Western biblical religion on a transcendent God.15 In general, he prefers Eastern to Western religion, and he reserves particular venom for the Jewish claim to be the chosen people who have received a unique revelation from God.16 That this denigration of Judaism is tied to Campbell’s own anti-Semitism
