Parallel Myths (46 page)
Authors: J.F. Bierlein
Oedipus, nearing Thebes, encountered the Sphinx, who asked him the riddle: “What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?” No traveler had yet successfully answered this question. Oedipus, however, replied without hesitating, “The human being.” For, as an infant, the human crawls on all fours; as an adult, it walks on two legs; and as an old man or woman with a cane, it goes about on three legs. The Sphinx was completely undone by Oedipus’s statement and plunged to its death down a gorge.
The Thebans rejoiced to be freed of the Sphinx; their city was once again the most prosperous in Greece and they acclaimed Oedipus as their king. With Laius dead, Jocasta gladly married the young hero. She had no way of knowing that Oedipus was, in fact, her own son. The prophecy was now complete.
Such a violation of the basic laws of the gods could not go unpunished, and Thebes was stricken with a horrible plague. Oedipus sent a Theban envoy to the oracle to learn how to end this plague. The Pythoness responded, “Get rid of the murderer of King Laius and the plague will end.” Oedipus obediently issued an edict pronouncing a curse on Laius’s killer and ordered the culprit’s exile. The investigation began.
After months had passed without finding the criminal, Oedipus despaired of ever reversing the plague. At this time, the blind seer Teiresias, the best-known in all Greece, demanded an audience with him.
Teiresias himself had an interesting life history. It is said that he had once seen two serpents engaging in the sexual act, which was always bad luck. When the serpents struck at him, Teiresias killed the female with his staff. According to Greek tradition, killing a female serpent turns a male into a homosexual, or even into a woman. In Teiresias’s case, he became a lascivious female prostitute. The situation
was made right when Teiresias went back and killed the male serpent, thereby regaining his manhood.
Another tale relates that he once, by chance, spied the virgin goddess Athena naked in her bath. For this he was blinded. However, his mother went to Athena to explain that it was only by accident that Teiresias had seen her bathing, not by design. Athena left him blind, but stationed a pet serpent to lick the boy’s ears, enabling him to understand the prophetic language of the birds and making him the greatest seer in all Greece.
In an alternate version of this story, he was blinded by Hera. Hera and Zeus were engaged in one of their frequent marital arguments as a result of Zeus’s unfaithfulness. Zeus defended himself by saying that females receive more pleasure than males from sex. Hera disagreed and called Teiresias, who had been both male and female, to settle the argument.
Teiresias answered the question in rhyme: “If the elements of sexual pleasure are ten, three times three parts are the women’s and but one part to men!” Zeus laughed heartily at the verse that supported his opinion; Hera was furious and struck the seer blind. As a reward for his service, however, Teiresias was given an extraordinarily long life. Thus this seer appears in hundreds of myths at very distant points in epic history.
With all of these stories of Teiresias’s general knowledge, it was very common for kings to ask the blind seer to settle disputes, solve crimes, and answer difficult questions. So Oedipus gladly accepted Teiresias’s offer to help. Teiresias responded that the murderer of Laius was a descendant of the children of the Hydra’s teeth. If this descendant were killed, the plague would end.
The Hydra was a monster that had been slain; when its teeth were sown as seeds, adult human beings sprang from the ground. One of these descendants of the Hydra’s teeth was old Menoeceus, the father of Jocasta and unwitting grandfather of Oedipus. When Teiresias spoke, Menoeceus knew that he had few years left anyway and threw himself from the city wall. The plague then ended.
However, it was not Menoeceus that Teiresias had had in mind; it was Oedipus, who, as Menoeceus’s grandson, was also a descendant
of the Hydra’s teeth. When Teiresias told all of the court of Thebes that the old man’s grandson needed to die, Jocasta replied that Menoeceus had no grandchildren. The seer then revealed to all that Oedipus was Menoeceus’s grandson, Laius’s son, and Jocasta’s son and husband: Oedipus had killed his own father and married his mother. Even more horrifying, Oedipus and Jocasta had had a daughter, Antigone, through their incestuous union.
At first, this news was too shocking to be believed. But Oedipus wanted the whole matter settled once and for all. So he contacted Periboea and asked her to tell of his origins—was he the son of Periboea and Polybus or was he not? Periboea responded by letter.
In the passing years, her husband had told her the oracle’s shocking prophecy about Oedipus. Her letter described this prophecy, and told of how the child was found and raised. She further reported that Oedipus was in the area where Laius was killed at the time of the murder. This damning evidence, confirming the allegations of Teiresias, was too much to bear.
Queen Jocasta hanged herself. Oedipus, seized with remorse and disgust, gouged out his own eyes. He was led away by Antigone, who was both his sister and his daughter.
It is said that Oedipus wandered the earth for many years thereafter, later encountering the hero Theseus. There are conflicting tales that he died bravely in battle or was hounded to death by the vengeance of the Furies at Colonus.
The fact is that no logical explanation of the many kinds of suffering is possible. But in certain experiences, and in the contemplation of certain events, we can on occasion grasp, momentarily and elusively, a shadowy outskirt of the truth. We can grasp it as we contemplate the Crucifixion—considered as at once the voluntary and necessary suffering of God himself. And we can grasp it as we read certain myths, such as that of the death of the blind Oedipus, who had suffered so atrociously and unjustly. But the reconciliation implied in this myth must be understood, not with reference to a future life, but as existing in eternal reality.
—Victor Gollancz (1893-1967),
British publisher and writer,
From Darkness to Light
Carl Gustav Jung
Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the cooperation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fulness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a word of God.
Carl Gustav Jung was the son of a Protestant minister of the German-speaking canton of Basel; he spent all of his life in Switzerland, between the cities of Basel and Zurich. Interestingly, Johann Jakob Bachofen was a friend and colleague of Jung’s paternal grandfather, also named Carl Gustav, and the elderly Bachofen was a familiar sight on the streets of Basel during the boyhood of the pioneer psychiatrist. Trained as a physician and neurologist, Jung became a disciple of Sigmund Freud, who for a time referred to Jung as “my dear son” and as his “heir” to the leadership of the international psychiatric movement.
By 1912, however, the two had parted company, and not on the best of terms. Jung freely acknowledged the contributions of Janet and others to Freud’s thinking; Freud was loathe to concede this. Jung questioned Freud’s “sacred” Oedipal theory of infantile sexuality; Jung thought it ridiculous to suppose that a male child was sexually attracted to his mother and jealous of the father. Jung also acknowledged the contributions of the anthropologists and sociologists Bastian, Lévy-Bruhl, and Dürkheim, incorporating them into his psychological theory. Most important, however, he continued to believe, following Freud, that the images in our dreams and our myths are definitely related. However, Jung did not feel that they were the products of individual memories.
Jung noted the connection between the symbols of dreams and those found in myth early in his career:
As early as 1909 I realized that I could not treat latent psychoses if I did not understand their symbolism. It was then that I began to study mythology.
Jung was critical of Freud’s dismissal of myth and religion as mere projections of the personal unconscious. For Jung, these images were universal, shared by all human beings. These theories were popularized during the 1970s and 1980s by Joseph Campbell, who wrote:
An altogether different approach [to myth] is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent the wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums [sic]. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science,
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which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myth alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.
Following the “Elementary Thought” advanced by Bastian, the “conscious collective” of Dürkheim, and the “representations collectives” of Lévy-Bruhl, Jung believed in the “collective unconscious,” that
every human being carries an inborn, neurologically based element of the unconscious that is manifested in dreams and myth.
The scripts of our dreams and our myths are contained in the collective unconscious; the characters are called “archetypes” by Jung. For example, Jung and Campbell identify “the hero” as an archetype common to all parallel heroic myths. Likewise, “the trickster” appears in similar myths as a recurring archetype.
Of the collective unconscious, Jung wrote:
A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the “personal unconscious.” But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the “collective unconscious.” I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.
My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature, and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually, but is inherited. It consists of preexisting forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite forms to certain psychic elements.
Jung wrote of the archetypes:
The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them “motifs.” In the psychology of the primitive they correspond to Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of “representations collectives,” and in the field of comparative
religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss
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as “categories of the imagination.” Adolf Bastian long ago called them “elementary” or “primordial” thoughts. From these references it should be clear that my idea of the archetype—literally a pre-existent form—does not stand alone but is something that is recognized and named in other fields of study.What the word “archetype” means in the nominal sense is clear enough, then, from its relations with myth, esoteric teaching and fairy tales…. So far mythologists have always had recourse to solar, lunar, meteorological, vegetal and various other ideas of this kind. The fact that myths are first and foremost psychic [i.e., of the psyche, or “mind”] phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul is something that they have absolutely refused to see until now. Primitive man is not much interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an imperative need … an irresistible urge to assimilate all outer experiences to inner, psychic events…. All the mythological processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective experiences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projections.
