MYTH MENU

Anthony Stevens

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Anthony Stevens (born 1933) is a British psychiatrist who studied both psychology and medicine at Oxford in the 1950s. During his years as a student, he went through analysis with the Jungian therapist Irene Champernowne, which he found very rewarding although he was at that time doubtful about the scientific basis of the method.[1]

Archetypes of Mythology by Stefan Stenudd This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link). Psychoanalysis of Mythology by Stefan Stenudd This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

       In 1966 he went to Greece to study attachment bonds in infancy at an institution for unwanted children. He found that psychological theories of the time failed to explain his findings, but they fit what the English psychiatrist John Bowlby had stated about the instinctual bonds between mothers and children, contrary to a learned behavior — just like with other animals. He found the explanation in ethology, the study of animal behavior in the wild, which had been pioneered by Konrad Lorenz. The pattern was visible also at the Greek institution, though the children made bonds with women who were not their mothers.[2]

       He wrote about this in his most renowned book, Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self from 1982, basing his take on psychology as a combination of Jungian theory about archetypes and ethology, akin to what Joseph Campbell concluded about their connection in his 1959 book Primeval Mythology, as discussed earlier.

       He had a firm stance on the importance of psychology learning and including the findings of biology, without which it was but a doctrine of faith:

Possessing no solid basis in biology, psychology could only lend itself the semblance of coherence by adopting the quasi-theological subterfuge of establishing dogmas that it became heresy for the faithful to deny.[3]

       Stevens was also a practicing analyst, before retirement. He has not written extensively about mythology or religion, but his focus on the Jungian archetypes and his effort to shed new light on them in accordance with biological science serves an example of how this Jungian concept has been adapted to later discoveries about the human mind.

In Defense of the Archetypes

In his 1982 book about the archetypes, Anthony Stevens claims credibility for having initially been a doubting Thomas regarding analytical psychology as a whole, including the unconscious and the archetypes.

       He had also come to question behavioral psychology, which was the paradigm of that time. The latter was easier to dismiss, since it just did not correspond to what he had discovered in his research in Greece. Jung’s theories would, but he was hesitant about them:

Jung’s theory of ‘archetypes’ operating through a ‘collective unconscious’ was exactly what I was after. The only problem was that I could not be sure if I believed in it, because I had never quite grasped what he meant.[4]

       He got over the hesitation after raising the issue with his former analyst Irene Champernowne, who told him that there was a biological explanation:

Archetypes, she declared, are biological entities. They are present, in related forms, throughout the animal kingdom. Like all biological entities they have a natural history: they are subject to the laws of evolution. In other words, archetypes evolved through natural selection.[5]

       That made them comparable to Konrad Lorenz’s innate releasing mechanisms and species-specific patterns of behavior, as well as John Bowlby’s goal-corrected behavioral systems. Animals in the wild have shown similar patterns, and humans are animals, too. Stevens studied Jung’s ideas about the archetypes and concluded: “Jung’s assertion that the archetype does not ‘denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning’ was biologically unimpeachable.”[6]

       That makes some sense, but Stevens may have read Jung with the hope of finding just that, since Jung’s theory contains a lot more than a mode of functioning. As mentioned in the chapter about Joseph Campbell’s similar idea, Jung’s archetypes are entities with their own definite powers and not just some instinctual patterns, not to mention the vast number of details they are supposed to contain. There is a limit to what instincts can carry through the genes. Furthermore, there is still the need for evidence of the archetypes Jung claimed to exist.

       It is, by the way, surprising that Stevens makes no mention of Joseph Campbell regarding this, although familiar with his writing. The only Campbell text he refers to is The Hero With a Thousand Faces, which does not treat this specific subject. But Campbell did so in Primitive Mythology, published more than twenty years before Stevens’ book. He even claims that, “until now,” no one has attempted to link together ethology and analytical psychology.[7] But that was exactly what Campbell did already in 1959.

       What is clear all through Stevens’ book is the high regard he has for Jung and his continued, even increased relevance to psychology as well as other related sciences — contrary to Freud, whose ideas have largely been dismissed:

Whereas many of the original concepts of Freud have been superseded, those of Jung are just beginning to receive the attention they deserve: in many respects it is true to say that it has taken science until now to catch up with him.[8]

       Stevens refers constantly to Jung’s writing, as if it were a gospel of the nature of humankind. Still, some of his interpretations tend to stray away from Jung’s ideas in an effort to prove them currently valid.

Mother and Child

Stevens has one objection to the perspective of ethology. It neglects the experience of the individuals. There are emotions involved, not just a biologically programmed pattern of behavior.

       As in the case of the child and the mother, “the child does not experience his mother as a mere behavioural sequence with punishing or rewarding attributes but as a person, an indispensable ‘other’, with recognizable features and personality characteristics which are uniquely precious to him.”[9]

       The lack of this perspective in ethology made him search for a theory including “what it is like”:

What I needed was a generally comprehensive theory capable of embracing both the behavioural manifestations of attachment and the inner psychic manifestations occurring in consciousness in the form of symbols, images, intuitions, feelings, words, etc.[10]

       He found it in Jung’s archetypes: “In contrast to Jung, the ethologists are concerned with the outer manifestations of living organisms rather than with their subjective experiences.”[11] Stevens searched a theory combining the two.

       But that raises several questions, the first being if he is correct to merge two phenomena into one, i.e., an instinctual behavior and an emotional experience. If instinct triggers the behavior, then the emotion is a response to it, and if the emotion is the trigger, then the behavior is not really instinctual.

       What Stevens suggests is that the instinct is in the form of an archetype, which is the one triggering the behavior, but that is a weirdly roundabout way for instincts to work. It might make some kind of sense for some archetypes, such as the mother and the child, but those relations and their responses are sufficiently explained by basic animalistic instincts. The mother and child archetypes may be convenient ways of describing them, but that is symbolical and not factual. It is merely a fancy terminology, implying that the instincts of our species can’t be as simple as those of other animals.

       Then there are all those archetypes that do not automatically lead to certain instinctual behaviors, such as the trickster, the scapegoat, the artist, mana and mandala, the tree, and water. Stevens would need to exclude them if claiming that archetypes are inherited modes of functioning, since the responses to them differ substantially between people and in many cases trigger no response at all.

       A more rewarding perspective to explore would be the emotions as reactions to instincts. The child’s connection to the mother is instinctual, and the emotions differ according to how that connection plays out. For example, the child reacts with sadness when the mother is absent and with relief when she returns, disappointment when she neglects the child and delight when she does not, frustration when their communication errs and merriment when it does not, et cetera.

       The emotions can also be in direct opposition to the instincts, when either the mother or the child dislikes the other, momentarily or constantly, which is not that rare. The instincts make a bond between them that can be called mutual love, but it doesn’t guarantee that they like each other. It can even lead to them hating the bond between them, revolting against their instinctual connection.

       The concept of the archetypes suggests that they are constants, just like the instincts, but life is more complicated than that. Constants are rare in the human psyche. Still, it is possible to describe variations like those mentioned above with archetypes. The mother archetype can turn into that of the evil stepmother, when the relation to the child goes sour. But it did not start with a change of archetypes. They give a symbolic description of the change, but they don’t explain it.

       Like Jung, Stevens hangs on to the archetypes as causes, although they are mere depictions at best. As such, though, they have their merits in making life and fate relatable to us — not necessarily relevant, but relatable. We turn reality into fiction and symbols, not to explain it as much as to deal with it, for solace as well as entertainment. We rarely insist that our fantasies are real, but if we do then mayhem ensues. That has been known to happen, surely also in analytic therapy.

Male and Female

There is a consistently narrow view among Freudians and Jungians about the genders, with ingredients of both misogyny and homophobia. For Freud and Jung it may be at least partially excused by the culture they lived in, but for later analysts it gets increasingly disturbing. Anthony Stevens with his 1982 book is no exception.

       Discussing the male initiation rites of many cultures, he claims that there are those who do not pass this test, and are therefore not accepted as men. He gives an example of what that leads to:

In some cultures, for example, failed initiates become ‘berdaches’ - shamans who must dress as females and if they are permitted to mate the union has to be a homosexual one.[12]

       This example was also used by James Hillman in his 1967 book Insearch, discussed earlier. It is a grossly uninformed statement. Homosexuality is not a punishment for insufficient maleness, but a known and in many cultures through time accepted variation of sexuality. There are numerous examples of that in numerous cultures. As for masculinity, both Hillman and Stevens should have taken a look at the sexual attitudes of the Spartans, who were not exactly famous for lacking traditional masculine traits. Greek mythology shows the same.

       What is expressed by Hillman and Stevens, as well as by most of their colleagues, is a prejudice from their own heritage, the doctrine of the Christian church and its morals. Stevens praises it as “the traditional patriarchal values enshrined in Judeo-Christian civilization for millennia.”[13] It is disappointing that they were unable to rise above that in their theories about the human psyche, but easy to see how this prejudice got so widespread and persistent among Freudians and Jungians.

       Freudians are fixed on the Oedipus complex, which is a purely heterosexual theory not even allowing a female counterpart, and it regards any homosexual tendency as a malfunction. Jungians adhere to the archetypes of anima and animus, the female in men and the male in women, which may sound like a liberated standpoint but again just confirms the binary conception of gender and sexuality, where deviations are psychic maladies in need of analytical therapy. Both theories are formed on the principle of heterosexuality as the healthy state, and those who are different can and should be cured. Stevens confirms this attitude when he states:

In our own society, the vast and, I believe, growing population of homosexual males may be seen as the result of failed initiation - not through any innate deficiencies of masculinity, but because, it seems, the masculine principle requires culturally sanctioned trials and ordeals if it is to be actualized in maturity.[14]

       In other words, he states that homosexuality is a cultural thing, created and multiplied by how people (and he means males) are raised. So, he assumes that “societies which provide no puberty rites will produce a large population of males in whom the masculine principle is only partially actualized. Certainly, this would seem to be the case in contemporary Western Society.”[15]

       That narrowminded view is Western in the cowboy movie sense. Boys should be raised so that they toughen and become real men, or they will be cowardly sissies prone to homosexuality. It is not psychology, but pure fiction.

       Stevens does find one advantage with an increase of homosexuality — it counters overpopulation.[16] Well, that is one way of looking at it. He continues by assuring the reader that it doesn’t stand in the way of individuation, the Jungian concept of self-realization: “From the purely psychological standpoint, the homosexual relationship, like its heterosexual counterpart, is a perfectly valid way of working out the individuation process.” And he has an archetypal explanation for both those types of sexuality:

For both sexes, and especially in adolescence (the period of the 'crush'), a beloved person of the same sex is experienced as a living embodiment of the Self, in much the same way as a beloved person of the opposite sex is experienced as an embodiment of the Animus/Anima.

       So, homosexuals love themselves, whereas heterosexuals love their inner entity of the opposite sex. Would that mean the former reject their anima or even lack one, and the latter can’t love themselves? What Stevens suggests is an overly complicated way to explain that some people love members of their own sex and others love those of the opposite sex. He applies a psychological terminology to it, but that in itself is no explanation as to either why or how, nor can it be empirically tested outside of Jungian analysis. To begin with, that would need evidence of the existence of anima and animus, which is yet to be presented.

       Stevens spends several pages of his book comparing his binarity of male and female to the Chinese concept of yin and yang.[17] He calls it Taoist, but it predates that philosophy with hundreds of years. Yang represents the light and yin the dark, as with a tree or a hill where one side is exposed to sunlight and the other is in the shade. This duality is applied to a lot of other phenomena, such as the two sexes, warm and cold, and heaven and earth. Taoism and other Chinese traditions describe the dynamic between yin and yang as a process in the world creation. Chapter 42 of Tao Te Ching, the primary Taoist text, states:

All things carry yin and embrace yang.
They reach harmony by blending with the vital breath.[18]

       The yin and yang concept is not primarily about the sexes, and Stevens takes it far beyond what the Chinese philosophy contains in his interpretation of it, but it has one aspect that does seem to connect to the Jungian idea about the sexes.

       Its famous symbol, the circle consisting of two identically shaped fields, where one is dark representing yin and one light representing yang, also has a light dot in the dark field and a dark one in the light field. They represent the idea that there is always some yang in yin and vice versa, which is not far-fetched to link to the Jungian idea of a female anime in man and a male animus in women.

       Not that it was what the ancient Chinese considered, but still there is a similarity.

       It must be pointed out, though, that Tao Te Ching does not make the connection between the sexes and yin and yang. There, the female is compared to water, which humbly floats to the lowest places, and this is a Taoist ideal. In fact, Tao itself, the supreme cosmic principle ruling existence, is called the mother of the whole world.[19] In that way, Taoism promotes the idea of the ultimate matriarchate.

Religion

In his book, Anthony Stevens does not investigate the phenomenon of mythology, unlike several other Jungians presented above. What he does, in line with just about every Jungian, is to apply mythological concepts to psychology. Mainly he uses deities, particularly Greek ones, as symbols of archetypes. Also, he compares some mythical events and components to psychological dynamics. They are merely tools in his psychology.

       Religion, on the other hand, he treats somewhat differently, although not with that many more words. He explains its structure and functions in society a well as in the individual mind, leaning mainly but not exclusively on his interpretations of Jung on those issues.

       Stevens connects it to biology, stating that “religions are like other biological phenomena: they evolve in directions which enhance the welfare of those who have them.”[20] That would make religion an evolutionary ingredient promoting the survival of the species and its societies. He stresses the crucial importance of it and the dire consequences of its absence:

History teaches that civilizations which lose faith in their gods normally crumble into barbarism and a protracted dark age, which endures until such time as a new culture arises or is imposed.[21]

       On the other hand, religious conviction has also been known to lead to barbarism and dark ages.

       He claims that the image of a primordial god is imprinted in our minds, however science may reject it, and it is quite clear that he refers to a monotheistic deity very much like the one in the Bible:

Science may continue to dismantle the ancient myths of our culture, but it can never entirely exorcise God from the story of creation. God as Will and First Cause, the Original Detonator of the Big Bang, He who set the whole universe in motion and is immanent in all its parts, the God of ‘process theology’, the God who as imago Dei is built into the Self.[22]

       That statement fails on the simple fact that there have been so many different conceptions of creation and deities in our world through time, and still are. There are even creation myths where no deity was responsible for the world to appear.

       Another objection to Stevens’ claim comes from none other than Laplace, the French scholar, in the famous anecdote about his conversation with Napoleon, who wondered why there was no mention of God in Laplace’s science. He replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.”

       As for the functions of religions, Stevens states that they have been “broadly the same” in all of them. His list of those functions is similar to other theories on the subject:[23]

       1. Mythological-explanatory, mainly about creation and our role in it;

       2. Sanctification of the social and ethical code, which he regards as “the most crucial function”;

       3. Ritual, “the method by which sanctification is prescribed and maintained”;

       4. Spiritual, “the perception of a transcendent meaning, the sense of participating in a higher purpose,” which in “the most advanced cultures” has been regarded as the most exalted function.

       None of those functions, though, are exclusive to religion.

       The first one is scientific by nature and has increasingly by time been replaced by science. The second, about social ethics, stands on its own, without any divine sanctification needed, which is shown by the many modern societies basing their ethics and laws on reason instead of religion. The rituals of the third function, too, obviously manage fine without a religious setting, since there are plenty of rituals and celebrations confirming a social order where deities and the like are absent or utterly peripheral. The last function, the spiritual, has often through history been fulfilled by political ideologies — for better or worse.

       There is nothing in the above that makes religious beliefs crucial. Stevens and many others with similar claims insist that these functions are religious by nature, and so is any other phenomenon applying them. But it is the other way around. Religion is just one of the social entities serving these purposes.

       Stevens suggests the same when he states that “religion evolved as a means of establishing absolute values in the interests of the stable continuity of the group.”[24] It is the social function that is essential, and not the religious method of achieving it. Still, he insists:

We shall never entirely escape from our need for mythology and religion: it is too fundamental a part of our nature, deeply irrational though it may seem.

       That is not a correct conclusion to draw from its use. If the need is social, anything that replaces and improves this function would make religion and mythology redundant. Of course, there may be other values of mythology and religion that preserve them. There surely are. But religion as such is not a necessity in itself, only to the extent it is relevant to some needs of ours, whether social or individual. Those needs may be biologically inherent in us, but religion is not.

       To Stevens, though, it is the other way around. He claims that religious beliefs are inherent in us, and therefore the neglect of them is crucially detrimental:

Religious belief is ‘planned for’ in the genome. People can no longer believe in God, yet they are programmed to believe in something. If God dies, they will find other vessels, however cracked, in which to pour their faith. Both Self and society need religion; without it both suffer and both ultimately perish.[25]

       But there is no religion in the genome. We are not inherently programmed to believe in something. That programming takes place after birth. Religions are learned and not inherited. Otherwise, they would not be so elaborate and different.

       They certainly make use of needs that are inherent in us, or they would fail to captivate. But that does not make religion one of those needs, much like we are inherently programmed with the urge to reproduce but not to wed before doing so — and we do not perish if we resist that urge.

Updated Edition

Twenty years after Archetypes was published, in 2003, Anthony Stevens released a revised version, where he included various findings and developments relevant to the subjects he treated in the first edition. Mainly he kept the original text, but added updates after each chapter.

       According to Stevens, the most important development is the influence of neo-Darwinian evolutionary thinking on psychology and psychiatry, “which has revolutionized how we look at human nature.” But he finds none of it contradicting Jung:

The findings of the two new disciplines, evolutionary psychology and evolutionary psychiatry, in no way contradict or supersede Jung's original insights into the nature and influence of the archetypes which make up the human collective unconscious: on the contrary, they corroborate and amplify them.[26]

       Consequently, Stevens sees no reason to revise his text or change its theme. Instead, he makes additions to it, “to trace what has happened to the archetype in the past 20 years in terms of our understanding of it and our responses to it.”[27]

       Recurring ingredients in those added comments are the defense of his claims in the first edition and the dismissal of critique he has received. He is not very prone to reconsider his position on any of the issues. Jung’s texts remain revered and his theories, as Stevens interprets them, are seen as precursors to later scientific discoveries about the human nature.

Mythological Symbols

In his 1999 book on the subject of symbols, Ariadne's Clue: A Guide to the Symbols of Humankind, Anthony Stevens uses mythology both to find examples and to explain them. His approach is psychological and also historical, in order to track their emergence. He aims to explain “the meaning of symbols in terms of their psychodynamic importance, as well as their evolutionary or prehistoric origins.”[28]

       That is quite an ambition, especially regarding the prehistoric origins. About those we can do little more than speculate, which does not mean we should refrain from it. On the contrary, thorough speculation is rewarding even if the results are dubious. It is by daring to be wrong we may eventually be right.

       In his pursuit, though, Stevens neglects the oldest remnants we have, such as graves, rock paintings, and sculptures from the Upper Paleolithic Period (c. 50,000-10.000 years ago). His main material is Greek, Egyptian, biblical, and later. Also, in spite of treating symbols, which are images also in the Jungian understanding — Stevens defines a symbol as “an image or a thing which acquires its symbolic value through the meanings and emotions it evokes in us”[29] — his book has few illustrations. There is none from Paleolithic times, not even a Lascaux cave painting or the Venus of Willendorf figurine. That excludes anything before the introduction of written language.

       So, the prehistoric origins are really all but ignored.

       No doubt, the archeological material from as far back as the Paleolithic Period is hard to interpret with any certainty. The graves do not necessarily indicate a belief in some afterlife, they might just have been what we would call sanitary arrangements. Even when they were decorated, it could simply be an expression of grief.

       The rock paintings are often explained as ritualistic or religious, but they can just be decorations and artistic expressions. Venus of Willendorf is usually seen as some kind of deity or a celebration of woman, like the Mother Earth that Stevens and other Jungians repeatedly mention. But it could again just be an artistic expression — of female beauty or, for that matter, Paleolithic pornography.

       Still, that in itself is interesting. Our distant ancestors showed no unquestionable sign of being what we call religious. So, maybe they were not. It is at least as likely as that they were. Like modern atheists, they could have been in awe of nature and its splendor, as well as of their own abilities to express that awe, without any worship of invisible entities or archetypes emerging from their unconscious.

       Like his fellow Jungians, Stevens insists on forming a web of symbols with causes and meanings that only they have the theory to explain. Then the Paleolithic Period is best to leave aside.

Dreaming

In his intent to understand the symbols as archetypal and find their origin in the unconscious, Stevens emphasizes the importance of dreams since they are not products of the conscious mind. Like other Jungians as well as Freudians, he sees dreaming as major evidence of an unconscious containing more than the conscious can perceive or even fathom, but still exercising a huge influence on it. But there are flaws in his understanding of this phenomenon.

       As an example of the power of dreams, he uses the 19th century German chemist August Kekulé, who had a dream of a snake biting its tail, which is the ancient ouroboros symbol, and thereby he realized the shape of the benzene molecule.[30] Both Carl G. Jung and Erich Fromm had previously referred to this as evidence of what dreams can bring.[31] But questions can be raised about its significance. Here is Kekulé’s own account:

I was sitting, writing at my text-book; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.[32]

       Strictly speaking, that is a daydream. Kekulé claimed to have had another dream revelation about chemistry a few years earlier, which doesn’t increase his credibility. He encouraged his students to dream, but wisely added, “let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”[33] So, he showed less confidence in his dreaming than Jung, Fromm, and Stevens did.

       Science has found strong indicators that all mammals and some other animals also dream, though nothing can be stated for certain about what those dreams contain. Do they have their own sets of archetypes, sending messages that push the dreaming animals towards individuation? At some point, those concepts lose their meaning.

       If dreaming is not exclusive to humans, then neither its origin nor its function can be specifically human. Other explanations, which are applicable to all dreaming species, must be sought. There is still no scientific consensus on what those explanations might be.

       What is easier to scientifically confirm than dreaming is that all animals sleep or, to be precise, they “exhibit a restorative cycle of rest following activity.”[34] Again, though, there is no consensus as to why, but two reasons seem likely. One is simply rest, and the recuperation it brings. The other is to conserve energy at times when activity is neither practical nor needed, such as nighttime for daylight creatures and winter for hibernating species.

       What has confused evolutionary biologists is the risk sleep entails, since it is a state when awareness of the surroundings is reduced. The sleeper becomes an easy prey. This is indicated by the fact that predators (and humans) tend to sleep for longer periods than prey.[35] On the other hand, in sleep we are the least noticeable, being both still and silent. That would be difficult when awake.

       Sleep is of vital importance. Being deprived of it for too long is even lethal to animals. Dreaming, on the other hand, seems not to be equally crucial. People can be deprived of REM sleep, which is when the main and sophisticated dreaming occurs, for weeks without damaging effects on their behavior.[36]

       So, sleeping is far more essential to us than dreaming. This opens for the possibility that Sigmund Freud was right when stating that dreams help to keep us asleep:

In a certain sense all dreams are dreams of convenience; they serve the purpose of continuing sleep instead of awakening. The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it.[37]

       Even when we are asleep, our brain needs something to do, a game to play, or it will get bored and awaken. However, that reveals nothing about the content of dreams. They may just be distractions, haphazard mixes from bits and pieces in the brain’s memory storage, loosely linked together into what appears to be stories, or fractions of stories. Sort of like vaudeville.

       Considering the vital priority of sleep over dreams, especially if the latter are what Freud called guardians of sleep, the Jungian theory of a number of archetypal symbols in a collective unconscious (or the phylogenetic psyche, as Stevens also calls it)[38] contributing to our self-realization is very far-fetched, indeed. Also, since it seems likely that all mammals dream, one must wonder what self-realization they have going for them.

       That does not mean dreams can’t contain symbols, i.e., symbolic representations of phenomena known from wakefulness. They would be sort of shorthand for significant ingredients in life, and could as such be components in the dreams of humans as well as other mammals.

       Not only in dreams do we simplify by the use of symbols. Also the perception of the awake mind simplifies and categorizes, so as to handle impressions swiftly and accurately. That is similar to the typical pattern of animals immediately noticing and reacting to movement, but not so much to static objects. It is a priority beneficial to survival.

       We tend overall to react to changes in our surroundings, but be almost blind to the already familiar and constant. That function in our minds is likely to generalize and simplify, thereby turning complex phenomena into what can be labeled symbols. But to the extent that these symbols are innate and shared by the whole species, they are tools for survival and not for some complicated process by which to know oneself. That’s the least of worries to animals in the wild. They don’t care about who or what they are, but about threats to their very existence.

       These symbolic representations appearing in dreams as well as in wakefulness, are for the most part composed from our personal experiences when awake. They do not consist of innate building blocks in a hidden unconscious. This is evident from the fact that our dreams mainly, if not completely, contain familiar persons, objects, and settings.

       Also strangers as such are familiar to us, since we meet them all the time in most modern societies. Even objects we never came across and places we never visited can be familiar if we have some impression or fragmentary knowledge of them. Those ingredients in dreams may be characterized as archetypal, in the meaning of a generic symbol of something, but it must be remembered that they are made up of our own impressions of them when awake.

       Accordingly, the fears or delights that the events in our dreams evoke are well-known to us and relate directly to our daily life. Those events may be highly unlikely, for better or worse, but what makes us react is the prospect of experiencing them when awake. Otherwise we would be indifferent to them.

       Dreams are staged by waking experiences, and not the other way around.

       The same can be said for symbols. They are formed and upheld by our waking experiences, or we would not be able to relate to them. This is shown by the simple fact that they symbolize phenomena belonging to waking and not to sleeping. Well, not to the subjective state of being asleep, anyway. Symbols of sleep concern its relation to being awake, but symbols of waking life need no reference to sleep.

       Not that it is always easy to tell those things apart. A famous example of the enigma was told by the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu in the 4th century BC. When he woke up from dreaming that he was a butterfly, he was not sure if it was instead a butterfly now dreaming of being him.[39] Yet, he was sure that there must be a difference, which he called the Transformation of Things.

       Indeed, there is a difference. We may not know that we are dreaming when we are, but we do know that we are awake when we are — if sound and sober, at least. There are surely exceptions, but not to the extent that we should base our understanding of reality on them.

Instinct

Somewhat in accordance with what can be said about the content of dreams, it is reasonably safe to state that our symbols are products of our conscious minds, relating to our waking life. The characteristics of the symbols are evidence of this, since they are products of conscious observation and interpretation and collectively adopted.

       The symbols Stevens includes in his books show this, too. Such classical symbols as the caduceus and the ouroboros stem from observations of nature, modified by conscious imagination. The same can be said for the planets, the discovery of which demanded persistent study of the night sky over long periods, and the elaborate mythologies connected to them — without which they would have been completely meaningless — were culturally developed. The fact that those white dots way up there in the nocturnal darkness were at all considered, although having no apparent effect on human life whatsoever, can only be explained as expressions of the conscious mind at work.

       All the socially shared symbols are conscious products. We learn or invent them, or a combination thereof. They are not genetically transmitted between generations.

       There is one exception, though, and Anthony Stevens has repeatedly pointed it out. Animals have instinctual reactions to some phenomena of grave importance to their well-being. Even symbolical representations of these phenomena trigger reactions, as discussed above regarding Stevens’ book about the archetypes and also regarding Joseph Campbell’s book Primitive Mythology. Konrad Lorenz, who made pioneer research on this behavior in animals, referred to it as innate releasing mechanisms (IRM).

       To Stevens, this is evidence of the innate Jungian archetypes. In his book on symbols discussed here, his definition of archetypes points directly at the IRM behavior:

Essentially, archetypes are genome-bound units of information which programme the individual member of a species to perceive, respond, and behave in ways which are adapted to the circumstances prevailing in the environment at any given time.[40]

       He compares it to birds building their nests:

The bird may not have a clear ‘idea’, in the human sense, of precisely what it is doing, but it must have some kind of ‘image’ of what the nest — the (arche)typical nest of the species — should be like whencompleted.

       Well, that is instinctual, which is a heavily researched and confirmed fact about animal behavior. Instincts exist also in humans, although it seems that our complicated brains and social structures tend to alter or repress some of them — as Freud in particular had stated, but also Jung.

       Actually, it is not that easy to find verifiable examples of IRM in humans.

       A commonly used example of instinctual reactions is how we behave when confronted with spiders or snakes, even if they are just images and not the living creatures. But it remains to be proven how instinctual these reactions really are. The results of studies vary. It might be a learned or conditioned behavior, i.e., having been told that spiders and snakes are scary, or having been scared by them earlier in life.

       One strong indicator of the fear of spiders and snakes not being innately instinctual is the fact that we do not all share it. As mentioned above in the chapter about Carl G. Jung, a 2020-2021 survey found the fear of reptiles in only 25% of the respondents, and that of spiders and other insects in only 23%. If it was genetically engraved in the instincts, these number should have been significantly higher. How can an instinct just exist in a quarter of the population? Natural selection would erase it in a few generations, by outnumbering alone. It is not that these fears significantly increase the chance of survival.

       Instincts in general are rather elusive in humans, and scientific consensus is rare. Jungians and Freudians may have weakened their arguments when trying to base so much of their psychological theories on what they regarded as instinctual urges.

       For example, self-preservation is seen as a basic instinct, but that would make both suicide and personal sacrifice for one or other reason impossible. Another instinct is to procreate, or at least to copulate, but this urge is resistible even for long periods, and some have no yearning at all to do it with the opposite sex. Feeding might be the most crucial instinct for survival, yet there are many who voluntarily fast for long periods or even choose to starve to the point of it being fatal. There may be no instincts that we are unable to control or even suppress by conscious effort.

       Not even very rudimentary reflexes are immune to conscious effort. We can create designed reflexes by persistent training, even when they are quite different from our innate behavior. When such fundamental natural programming can be altered, it is far-fetched to assume that there would be anything in our minds inaccessible to us.

       A psychology founded on anything else than the conscious mind is bound to lead to an inadequate perception of our nature.

Memes

There is an interesting alternative explanation to the emergence and spread of symbolic concepts. It comes from the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. With his profound understanding of the role of the genes in evolution, he doesn’t even bother to refute the Jungian idea of the archetypes being genetically inherited. But in the last chapter of his bestselling book The Selfish Gene from 1976, he presents the concept of memes as transmitters of cultural content, compared to genes and their biological content.

       The memes are ideas that spread culturally, where some are successful and others just fade away. It is similar to the success or failure of mutated genes, or for that matter viruses, which are more or less contagious and have varying levels of influence on those infected. This is how he came up with the term:

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’[41] comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.[42]

       He ends his book with a hopeful message, where he actually argues for the human capacity to overcome the biological inheritance of the genes as well as the cultural inheritance of the memes. Our species has that capacity:

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism — something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.[43]

       Anthony Stevens is not completely satisfied with the meme concept, which is hardly surprising. What Dawkins proposes has nothing to do with symbols innate in a collective unconscious. His memes are socially upheld and transmitted. That is far from the Jungian archetype theory.

       Stevens bases his critique of Dawkins on the French cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber, who pointed out that memes are less stable than genes, since they tend to undergo some degree of change every time they are transmitted.[44]

       Of course they are, and Dawkins has certainly not claimed the opposite. Ideas that spread across society not only change in the process, but add content along the way. It is not even sure that they are recognizable at the end of it, evolving into very different ideas. Then again, some ideas can stay remarkably the same across time and separate cultures.

       Since memes move through thought and not through the complicated process of genetic mutations, their evolution can be very swift and often is. But of course genes change, too, though it takes much longer for the effect to be significant and noticeable. So, the comparison is not between something mutable and something immutable, but between two mutable phenomena of different speed and modus operandi. Everything in the universe changes, in its own fashion and tempo.

       But Sperber claims that some concepts do not. Stevens quotes him about supernatural ideas, “throughout the world’s cultures, the same kinds of gods, dragons, devils and ghosts recur again and again,” which is due to “commonalities of the human mind.”

       These “same kinds,” though, deteriorate upon closer inspection, since they stem from the prejudice of the observers. The myths and beliefs around the world have been documented and interpreted mainly by researchers from a Christian tradition, and this influenced their perception substantially. It still does. But gods are very different indeed, to the point where it is meaningless in some cases to speak about gods at all. That also goes for dragons, devils, and ghosts. Actually, it is equally true for mythology and the whole concept of religion.

       The simple truth is that the similarities are mostly in the eyes of the beholder. Searching for similarities you are sure to find them, just as you are sure to find differences if searching for those. Furthermore, even to striking similarities there can be a lot of explanations other than archetypes in a collective unconscious.

       After all, there are indeed commonalities of the human mind, which means that similarities are to be expected also in what is believed about what is not known.

       Richard Dawkins’ clear distinction between the gene and the meme remains far more convincing. They are separate processes. Their connection is that genes led to a brain able to create memes. But memes, ideas, symbols, and beliefs are not genetically transmitted.

Religion

Regarding religion, Anthony Stevens follows in the footsteps of Jung, claiming that “religious beliefs and practices, which are universally characteristic of human communities, are archetypally determined.” He insists that a religious inclination is innate in human beings, like an instinct of sorts. Not a specific religion, of course, but the urge to be devoted to one or other. He compares it to language, “the propensity for religious beliefs and behaviour is innately ‘prepared for’, like the propensity for speech.”[45] He explains:

The particular set of religious beliefs and rites practised in a given society has to be learned by each generation in the same way as its language. But the idea that there will be a religious system and a language which will have to be learned appears to exist in all growing individuals as an a priori assumption.

       It is an odd comparison, since language is a prerequisite for religion. Some kind of religious belief might have been possible in the isolated non-communicative mind of the primeval human. There is probably no way of knowing. But all of what is meant by religion needs to be expressed and shared, in order to develop and continue.

       Claiming that the existence of religion is evidence of its innate nature, like the ability to form language is necessary to learn it, is misleading. The human mind is able to grasp all kinds of concepts and perspectives, which does not mean they were all inherently present. It would be more adequate to state that the human mind is able to understand and use abstract concepts — or, really, that the mind can think of all kinds of things.

       With his argument, Stevens approaches Plato’s idea of all knowledge being innate or it would not be possible to express. Accordingly, there is no learning, only recollection. He had Socrates prove it in an experiment where an uneducated slave was able to solve a geometrical problem, only by Socrates’ encouragements.[46] Those encouragements, though, contained a number of hints and clues. It would not pass as a proper empirical experiment.

       Yet, Plato is clear about all knowledge, and not just some of it, being innate. Therefore it cannot be used to emphasize the significance of one certain knowledge. Also, of course, neurology has proven Plato wrong. Recollection is not enough to acquire knowledge. It has to be learned.

       Whatever we think, it is with language we convey it to each other, and it is by the exchange of ideas that they take fixed forms. Abstract ideas, in particular, can hardly travel from one mind to another without a language to express them. To state the obvious: There would be no religion to speak of, without language.

       Stevens insists with his Jungian perspective on religion and all its aspects. Discussing rites, he makes this distinction between the sacred and the profane:

At the psychic level, the realm of the sacred corresponds to the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious, while the profane corresponds to that of the personal psyche.[47]

       But how to experience the sacred without conscious awareness? Promoting something to sacred is a social process, shared with those who are likeminded and expressed in rituals. Without the conscious social connection it is meaningless. That is also true for rites practiced in solitude. They are established and upheld socially, and we relate to them conscious of their social meaning.

       We may have personal experiences of higher meaning, but it takes social confirmation for something to be sacred.

       As for the profane, there is nothing about it that excludes it from the collective. We share the profane at least to the extent that we share the sacred. Actually, the polarity as such is false. The sacred and the profane are not opposites. We relate to reality and our perception of it as a whole. Some of it we may agree to regard as sacred, and the rest not. We still relate to it all with the same mental apparatus.

Gods

Discussing gods, Anthony Stevens starts with a theory of their origins, which has been around for centuries:

The earliest religions probably arose through the attribution of deity to natural forces and phenomena, such as the sun, moon, sky, earth, earthquakes, thunder, the rain, and the wind.[48]

       It is far from the only theory about the emergence of the belief in deities, but it is a reasonable one. Primeval humans would have been likely to think that any activity they observed on earth as well as in the sky must be caused by something or someone, just like they themselves made things happen by willful action. How else could the sun and moon be moved across the sky, the earth shake, the rain fall, and so on?

       There must have been what Aristotle called a mover. Without any knowledge of the physics behind those things, it was a reasonable conclusion. And since there was no visible explanation to those movements, the ones causing them must be invisible.

       If our distant ancestors were able to think rationally, and remnants of their tools and customs show that they were, then the idea of unseen powerful beings responsible for the events that lacked visible causes made sense — until more plausible explanations were revealed much later in our history.

       But Stevens goes on, shifting the perspective from the rational to the symbolical, though that is not really called for: “Essentially, gods and goddesses are personifications of archetypal potential.”[49] He remarks that it takes people of psychological sophistication to understand this, and people without it “actually believe in their gods and goddesses as existing and real.” But it is not simply so that by understanding this, everything is fine. There is a risk with the insight:

This sophistication is achieved at a price, however, for a culture that no longer believes in its gods is spiritually adrift and in danger of disintegration.

       As usual, his source to this rather extreme conclusion is Jung. But the danger of disintegration has been known to plague cultures with those beliefs, too. Religion is no vaccine against social unrest. Frequently it has instead been the instigator of it.

       As for “spiritually adrift,” one must wonder what it means apart from a loss of religious belief, which is just saying that losing the belief is losing the belief. If being spiritual means more than that, then there are so many other ways to experience and express it than by worshipping a specific set of deities.

       Even when it comes to changing gods instead of deserting them altogether, societies may have gone through some tumultuous times for a while, but hardly disintegration. If anything is to be concluded from such developments, it is that cultures adapt to new religions rather smoothly, perhaps because their function in society is not dependent on the names by which the gods are known.

       Certainly, deities often have the dignity and significance that can be called archetypal, and they play symbolic roles in the myths. Their appearances and behaviors can almost be seen as caricatures of what they represent, both larger and more extreme than humanly possible.

       But that does not mean their origin and nature is archetypal in the Jungian sense. Their function is better explained as symbols of natural forces, which is what also Stevens suggests. In mythology, the deities are anthropomorph embodiments of powers that lack other explanations. For example, in creation myths they are mainly components in the story, pieces of the puzzle of how the world might have come to be.

Creation Myths

Stevens also discusses creation myths, and there is good reason for it. Cosmogonies are at the core of many mythologies, probably most of them, and they are usually given huge importance in worship as well as rituals. Originally, those myths were efforts to answer the question of how the world in all its vastness began, and this was done in what Stevens calls “the pre-scientific terminology of myths and symbols.”[50] He continues:

When all these mythic and scientific explanations are compared, a profoundly interesting fact emerges; they often overlap in such a way as to suggest that the primordial mind and the modern mind have been working along similar lines.

       It is true that there are some similarities between how creation myths and modern science conceive the origin of the world, but they are in the reasoning and not in the details. Since the question is the same, so must some of the speculative answers be.

       The basic idea that the world would have had a beginning, instead of eternally being the same, was deducted from observations of the cyclic phenomena — from the movements of the sun and the moon up in the sky, to the birth, growth, and decay of living things down on earth. Especially the latter. Since all creatures are born and eventually die, even plants, the idea rose that this might be true for everything in the world.

       Thus, darkness before the sun, the moon, and the stars lit up the sky, and a barren land before the first plants grew and the first animals and humans were born, ancestors to all the following generations. Creation myths were formed on speculations about what the primordial state would have been and how the world and everything in it emerged. This was done with a combination of reason and imagination, which is also how scientific discoveries are made.

       Stevens mentions the big bang theory as an example of how myth and science overlap, pointing to Buddhist mythology as an example. But there is one more nearby, in Genesis 1 where God begins creation by ordering light to appear in the darkness, indeed similar to the moment when stars ignited in the universe, although that was hardly done in a day.

       He gives another example: “The notion that all life originally emerged from the sea is common to a great many mythic cosmologies.”[51] It is true that many creation myths start with a primordial sea, but not that all life emerged from it. Much more typical is that the earth rose from the sea and then plants, animals, and people appeared there, on land. Few myths mention fish or submarine vegetation.

       It is no mystery that so many myths begin with a sea. Those people who lived close to one, or a lake so big that the land on its other side was not visible, would be in awe of its vastness and permanence. Also, anyone standing by the shore could see that the land rose out of it, so it made sense that the whole earth had done the same.

       Stevens makes another claim, which is as bold as it is questionable:

A large number of peoples hold the belief that the moon and the earth were originally of the same substance.

       Most if not all creation myths describe the earth and the moon as completely separate entities of different substances. The moon is instead linked to the sun and the stars, usually appearing in the same phase of creation. What is very clear in mythology, as Stevens also repeatedly points out, is the strict division between heaven and earth. Things up high are nothing like things on earth. Stevens should have given at least one example of what he claims. I cannot think of any.

       Those similarities, real or imagined, between the myths and scientific facts lead Stevens to this conclusion:

These fascinating parallels are hints that archetypal processes are links between physical and psychic realities — that the laws on which the universe proceeds may also help shape our mental attitudes to them and the hypotheses we formulate to comprehend them.

       Certainly, creation myths consist of elements that can be seen as archetypal, such as the deities and the grand events in primordial times. It is less evident that scientific cosmogony can be said to contain archetypes. Most of it is just very advanced mathematics based on astronomical observations. An archetypal perspective on it is of limited use.

       Also, the parallels between myth and science are neither as obvious as Stevens portrays them, nor explained the most convincingly by archetypal theory. As for creation myths, their components can be unraveled by examining the plausible thought process leading to them.

       There were some great enigmas our ancestors had to wrestle with, when trying to figure out how the world may have begun. Stevens mentions some of them, first of all what he calls the ultimate koan, borrowing the Zen term, which is how something can come out of nothing. Still today, that is a paradox lacking a solid explanation.

       In most creation myths this problem was escaped by the primordial state not being nothing, but something, such as a sea or a gap. Genesis 1 is an example of this, although that creation myth is usually categorized as creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Before starting his week of work, God’s spirit hovers in darkness over the water. That means at least three things were preexistent — the water, a space above it, and God’s spirit. And, whether in this void or outside it, God existed, too.

       It was, of course, very hard for our ancestors to imagine a complete nothing to begin with. At the very least, there would be a space, a void, in which creation took place, but often more than that. It is the same with a primordial deity. Most myths mention one deity, sometimes two or more, already before creation began, and the rest have a deity appear early on.

       It is noteworthy that an original state without any deity is found in several creation myths, but not one without some kind of space or substance in which that deity can appear. In other words, even a primordial deity starting the creation of the world was believed to exist inside of it.

       In the case of a single primordial deity, it is almost always male. That may be counterintuitive to us, but it is not necessarily only an expression of patriarchy. In ancient times the male seed was known but the female egg not, so it seemed that new life was the product of male essence and women were mere vessels of it.

       Strangely, Stevens presents the opposite view, when later in his text discussing the virgin birth:

The story of the virgin birth predates the Christian myth by a very long time: it probably owes its origins to that epoch of human emergence when the significance of male semen was unappreciated. The woman was thought to be entirely responsible for the child’s creation, its conception being attributed to the numinosum[52] — the divine wind or the spirit of the ancestors. If the phallus played a part, it was merely as a means to ‘open the way’ for the generative spirit to enter the womb and cause the accumulation of blood to be miraculously transformed into a child.[53]

       That is unlikely bordering on the absurd. Of course our ancestors were aware that to reproduce, both man and woman are necessary. It is evident in many mythologies, too, where also deities procreate in the conventional way. In mythological reasoning, children who are born by a divine wind or some other superhuman agent will be divine, too. There are stories about children of human mothers and divine fathers, and they are always exceptional, if not superhuman.

       Stevens also mentions the cosmic egg, which is found in a number of creation myths. To him it is a symbol of the primordial deity, but there is another explanation of it nearer at hand. When the very simple and pure form of the egg cracks, a living being exits and grows. That makes it a tempting object by which to explain the emergence of the world.

       Every ingredient and event in creation myths is possible to explain without the use of archetypes or other psychological references. It is usually enough to apply reason, and often some very imaginative solutions adding flair to the story. Creation myths are stories, which means that they need to make sense within their own premises, and to entertain their intended audiences.

       Stevens summarizes the function of those myths differently:

Creator gods give rise to other gods and these give rise to heroes, whose ordeals, trials, battles, adventures, loves, and exploits define the archetypal modes of human existence.[54]

       That is one way of putting it, but he excludes one thing, which is the main characteristic of creation myths — their effort to explain how the world was created. When that perspective is excluded, they don’t make much sense anymore, and alternative explanations get overly complicated, which makes it very difficult to argue for them convincingly.

       Stevens makes a similar mistake explaining the fall of man, when Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden for eating the forbidden fruit:

This ‘loss of Eden’ can be understood on at least five symbolic levels: the migration of our early ancestors from forest to savannah; the transition from the hunter-gatherer existence to pastoral and farming life, and the emergence of civilization; the expulsion of the baby from the womb; the differentiation of the ego from the Self; and the development of human consciousness.[55]

       The first levels make some contextual sense, already by the fact that this the second creation story of the Bible relates to earthly life and agriculture, whereas the first one has more of a cosmic perspective. But the last three are far-fetched, indeed. What the story tells, instead, is how humans became mortal and their life filled with hardship and suffering. Those are themes recognizable from many other creation myths.

       The creation myths around the world and through human history are far from homogenous. The common patterns to be found in them are not in their setting or pantheon, but maybe in how certain settings and certain pantheons lead to similar chains of events.

       For example, where there is only one divine creator of it all, such as in the Avesta of Zarathustra, the Bible, and the Quran, human beings are soon at center stage, whereas in polytheisms they tend to appear late in the story and not really become main characters. The deities stay in the spotlight.

       Also, regarding deities, no matter how many they are, there seems to be one in charge, distinctly more powerful and important than the others. In the history of religion this deity is called a high god. It is not necessarily so that this supreme deity created the world, although that is often the case, but he — yes, it is always a he — is the ruler of the other deities and just about everything else. Except for their elevated position, though, these high gods can be quite different in character, abilities, and activities.

       A strict monotheism is actually hard to find. In the Bible and the Quran there are other superhuman beings, the devil and the angels, who are refused the title of god but are quite comparable to deities in polytheism. They are not bound to earth and they seem not to be mortal. Also, they have powers beyond what is humanly possible. So, they are deities in every sense, whatever they are called.

       Avesta has the supreme god Ahura Mazda, but also originally the benevolent spirit Spenta Mainyu and the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu. In later Zoroastrianism, the three became two, Ohrmazd (Ahura Mazda) and Ahriman (Angra Mainyu), but never just one.

       To Stevens, the devil represents the shadow archetype, who is “the stranger/predator/evil intruder.”[56] That is one way of putting it. Similar figures exist in many mythologies, and the term used for them is trickster. They are often involved in creation or the continued formation of the world, tricking deities to act against their own intentions, often to the benefit of humans. Although always deceitful, they are not necessarily evil.

       The serpent in Genesis is a clear example of a trickster, making Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit — but that was what gave them knowledge of good and evil, by which they became a threat to God and had to be expelled from Eden.

       Satan in the Old Testament is the accuser, acting like a kind of prosecutor in God’s service by questioning and testing people’s faith. So, he is not so much evil as strict. It is in the Christian tradition he has turned into the personification of evil.

       The trickster is one of Jung’s archetypes, but it is not his invention. Nor was he the one to introduce it in the study of mythology. He just applied his own theories on that figure, as he did on many other mythical characters and phenomena, and Stevens repeats his approach without question.

Jungians on Myth and Religion

1. Introduction

2. Erich Neumann

3. Károly Kerényi

4. Joseph L. Henderson

5. Joseph Campbell

6. Mircea Eliade

7. Marie-Louise von Franz

8. Charles H. Long

9. James Hillman

10. Anthony Stevens

11. David Adams Leeming

12. Jordan B. Peterson

13. Literature

This text is an excerpt from my book Archetypes of Mythology: Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in January, 2023.

© Stefan Stenudd 2022, 2023

---

MYTH

Introduction

Creation Myths: Emergence and Meanings

Psychoanalysis of Myth: Freud and Jung

Jungian Theories on Myth and Religion

Archetypes of Mythology - the book

Psychoanalysis of Mythology - the book

Ideas and Learning

Cosmos of the Ancients

Life Energy Encyclopedia

On my Creation Myths website:

Creation Myths Around the World

The Logics of Myth

Theories through History about Myth and Fable

Genesis 1: The First Creation of the Bible

Enuma Elish, Babylonian Creation

The Paradox of Creation: Rig Veda 10:129

Xingu Creation

Archetypes in Myth

---

About Cookies

---

My Other Websites

CREATION MYTHS

Myths in general and myths of creation in particular.

TAOISM

The wisdom of Taoism and the Tao Te Ching, its ancient source.

LIFE ENERGY

An encyclopedia of life energy concepts around the world.

QI ENERGY EXERCISES

Qi (also spelled chi or ki) explained, with exercises to increase it.

I CHING

The ancient Chinese system of divination and free online reading.

TAROT

Tarot card meanings in divination and a free online spread.

ASTROLOGY

The complete horoscope chart and how to read it.

MY AMAZON PAGE

MY YOUTUBE AIKIDO

MY YOUTUBE ART

MY FACEBOOK

MY INSTAGRAM

MY TWITTER

STENUDD PÅ SVENSKA

---

Stefan Stenudd

About me
I'm a Swedish author of fiction and non-fiction books in both English and Swedish. I'm also an artist, a historian of ideas, and a 7 dan Aikikai Shihan aikido instructor. Click the header to read my full bio.