Károly Kerényi

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

The Hungarian classical scholar Károly Kerényi (1897-1973) was not a Jungian, strictly speaking, although he had a similar understanding of mythology and was invited by Jung to lecture repeatedly on the topic in Switzerland.

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).

The main reason for including him here is that he co-wrote a book on that very subject with Carl G. Jung:Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie (Introduction to the Essence of Mythology) in 1942.

It this book they take turns. Kerényi presents mythological themes,mythologems, and Jung adds psychological aspects to them. There are two main themes, the child-god and the Kore. According to Kerényi, the latter is not only Persephone who is usually associated with the name, but the maiden goddess in general. Kore simply means maiden.[1]

In spite of their elaborate ways to analyze mythology, Kerényi insists that one does justice to it, “not by interpretation and explanation but above all by letting it alone and allowing it to utter its own meaning.”[2] He adds:

In a true mythologem this meaning is not something that could be expressed just as well and just as fully in a non-mythological way.

It stops neither of them from trying, but Kerényi does so with evident knowledge of and admiration for the Greek myths, which constitute the vast majority of his references. He claims that mythologies always refer to a primordial time, which is true in a general sense. At least they usually start there, and remain in a distant past. What he says about the divine child, though, can be debated:

The mythologies speak in the image of a divine child, the first-born of primeval times, in whom the “origin” first was; they do not speak of the coming-to-be of some human being but of the coming-to-be of the divine cosmos or a universal God.[3]

A primordial child-god is not typical in mythology. Really, most creation myths are strikingly devoid of children. Deities emerge as adults. Even humans do when it is time for their appearance. Not a word about an initial childhood. This is in itself worthy of pondering. Why is childhood so rare in creation myths, although we know from ourselves that it inevitably follows birth?

Kerényi’s statement can only be understood symbolically. When gods are born, they must do that as children although it is not mentioned in the myths. He seems to regard it as implied, but that is a weak basis for a theory of the mythological meaning.

When discussing Kore, the maiden goddesses, he readily admits that they are “far more typical of Greek religion than boy-gods.”[4]

As for Kore, he sees her as a female counterpart to the boy-god, representing the woman’s fate in a budlike form:

The Kore-goddess throws light on the old mythological idea of the bud in its capacity to unfold and yet to contain a whole separate world in itself. The idea can also be likened to a nucleus.[5]

He goes on to state that divine maidens are so typical of Greek religion that it can be called neither a “Father religion” nor a “Mother religion” or a combination of the two:

It is as though the Olympian order had thrust the great Mother-Goddesses of olden time into the background for the sole purpose of throwing the divine Korai into sharper relief.

As with the child-god, Kerényi may have exaggerated the importance of Kore in Greek mythology. It is voluminous, which means all kinds of patterns can be extracted from it. The question is if they are the most adequate ones. He seems to be guided by a wish to find archetypes fitting his — and most likely Jung’s — idea of a nucleus of mythology.

Contrary to his co-writer, though, Kerényi is rather reluctant to use the term archetype. He mentions it only three times in passing. To compare, his use of the concept monad, as understood by the ethnologist Leo Frobenius, is much more frequent. He explains the concept:

Frobenius names such factors, which are not amenable to further explanation, “monads” and sees in them the “structural principles” of the various views of the world in various cultures.[6]

Primordial image

Generally in his writing, Kerényi seems hesitant to apply the term archetype — or even to mention Jung. In The Heroes of the Greeks, written more than a decade after the above discussed text, he just mentions Jung once, and that is in the preface. He doesn’t dwell on the archetypes at all, although the hero is the most central of them in Jungian thought.

Also in his last book, Zeus and Hera, he mentions Jung once, in the introduction, but the term archetype appears several times, also in the subtitle, Archetypal Image of Father, Husband, and Wife. But that is in the English translation.

The German subtitle uses “Urbild” (primordial image) instead of archetype. They are often treated as synonymous, although the word “Archetyp” exists in the German language. Kerényi uses it a few times in the German version of the book. At one instance he connects it to Urbild, and there the English translator chose “prototype” for the German word, which is neither wrong nor optimal.

Anyway, while comparing the two words, Kerényi explains why he is reluctant to use archetype: “The Greek word archetypos — from the language of the philosophers — is adjectival and I like to use it substantively only when greater intelligibility can be achieved.”[7] That grammatical condition was respected by the translator in the subtitle, and there are plenty of instances of the adjective archetypal in the text.

It is harder to understand the titleAsklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence, since neither archetype nor prototype or anything like it is in the German title:Der Göttliche Arzt. Studien über Asklepios und seine Kultstätte. But Kerényi explains in the preface that he was the one insisting on that translation in the subtitle for this and the other monographs on Greek deities. He did so to “stress the possibility of convergence with modern psychology.”[8]

Still, he insists on the previous page that he does not attempt to apply the methods of Jungian psychology. He refers to other writers for that. The word is not used elsewhere in the book.

His reluctance to use archetype as a noun separated him distinctly from Jung, who definitely regarded the archetypes as entities in the collective unconscious. Kerényi stayed with the adjective, indicating that he did not agree with Jung on that.

What he described with the word was an attribute, and not a thing in itself. To him, then, the father was not an archetype, but some mythological fathers could be archetypal, and the same for the mother, the maiden, and so on. He also allowed for the archetypal significance of a deity to change as its role shifted in the mythology.

Jung’s view was much more rigid.

In the introduction toEleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter Kerényi discusses Jung at some length, and points out that it was not he who turned to Jung, but the opposite. Jung found support for his own theories in Kerényi’s writing.[9]

Kerényi is clear about not always agreeing with Jung’s interpretations, for example when it comes to the archetypal:

From my point of view, I speak of archetypal facts of human existence, of realities which cannot be mere realities of the psyche and which, of course, are also not concrete in the manner of tangible objects.[10]

[1] Carl G. Jung & Károly Kerényi, On a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis , transl. R. F. C. Hull, New York 1949 (originally published in German 1942), p. 147.

[2] Ibid., p. 4.

[3] Ibid., p. 12.

[4] Ibid., p. 148.

[5] Ibid., p. 147f.

[6] Ibid., p. 26.

[7] Károly Kerényi,Zeus and Hera: Archetypal Image of Father, Husband, and Wife , transl. Christopher Holme, Princeton 1975 (originally published in German 1972), p. xii.

[8] Károly Kerényi,Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician’s Existence, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York 1959 (originally published in German 1947 and revised in 1956), p. xxvi.

[9] Károly Kerényi,Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, transl. Ralph Manheim, New York 1967 (originally published in 1960), pp. xxiv ff.

[10] Ibid., p. xxxii.

Jungians on Myth and Religion

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.

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Károly Kerényi

His theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Primordial image

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