Archetypal Mythological Approaches to Literature #

Although every people has its own distinctive mythology which may be reflected in legend, folklore, and ideology, myths take their specific shapes from the cultural environments in which they grow—myth is, in the general sense, universal. Furthermore, similar motifs or themes may be found among many different mythologies, and certain images that recur in the myths of peoples widely separated in time and place tend to have a common meaning or, more accurately, tend to elicit comparable psychological responses and to serve similar cultural functions. Such motifs and images are called “archetypes.” They refer to images that strike a deep chord in psyches across the ages and across cultures.

Joseph Campbell in The Masks of God, observed that newly hatched chicks will dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead, yet are unaffected by other birds. Also, a replica of a hawk pulled on a wire will also make them give flight, however not if it is drawn backward. He concludes that their fear is based on an imprint on their instinct.

Do we as humans also have similar deeply imbedded primal implants?

Archetypes are “universal symbols.”* As Professor Wheel Wright explains in Metaphor and Reality (Indiana, 1962), such symbols are those which carry the same or very similar meanings for a large portion, if not all, of mankind. It is a discoverable fact that certain symbols, such as the sky father and earth mother, light, blood, up-down, the axis of a wheel, and others, recur again and again in cultures so remote from one another in space and time that there is no likelihood of any historical influence and causal connection among them.

Carl Jung’s theory of Archetypes concerns Myths, ubiquitous and universal, in time as well as place: it is a dynamic factor everywhere in human society; transcending time, uniting the past (traditional modes of belief) with the present (current values) and reaching toward the future (spiritual and cultural aspirations). They are collective and communal belonging to the people. Myths reflect the unconscious desires, anxieties and fears of peoples; a palpable projection of a people’s hopes, values and aspirations, representing their deepest instinctual existence. They attempt to express the tribe’s awareness of the meaning of life and its place in the universe.

Professor Schorer claims, “it is the essential substructure of all human activity”

Although every people has its own distinctive mythology which may be reflected in legend, folklore, and ideology—although, in other words, myths take their specific shapes from the cultural environments in which they grow—myth is, in the general sense, universal.

Furthermore, similar motifs or themes may be found among many different mythologies, and certain images that recur in the myths of peoples widely separated in time and place tend to have a common meaning or, more accurately, tend to elicit comparable psychological responses and to serve similar cultural functions. Such motifs and images are called “archetypes.”

Jung likened the collective unconscious to a reservoir which stored all the experiences and knowledge of the human species. Jung believed that humans experienced the unconscious through numerous symbols encountered in various aspects of life such as dreams, art, and religion.

Jung’s ideas were eclipsed by Modernism.

Primitive societies had an obsession with fertility. Any drought, famine or pestilence was seen as a punishment from superior beings. The safety and welfare of the tribe depended on the health and life of a semi-divine or demi-god ruler. A healthy vigorous and virile king ensures natural and human productivity.

A sick, maimed or impotent king brings blight and disease to the land and the people. To avert this danger, the man -god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms of decline or failure and his power transferred to a vigorous successor.

Kings eventually thought it better to have a substitute figure or animal to die in their place.

To demonstrate their potency, Pharaohs took on a principal queen as the Royal wife, and several other wives to spread his genes. Rames I is reputed to have more than forty sons and forty daughters. Priam has fifty sons and many daughters. Power is some aphrodasiac.

Solomon had affairs with heathen women, countless wives and concubines. Sultans also gathered vast harems. Ghengis Khan was very generous with his sperm; 25% of Asian population contains his DNA.

Phallic symbols promoted human fertility, with wild orgiastic spring festivals to encourage people to procreate - first evidence of pornography? Hitler sponsored youth camps to boost the population to provide more warriors.

The Fisher King is a figure in Arthurian legend, the last in a long line of British kings tasked with guarding the Holy Grail. The Fisher King is both the protector and physical embodiment of his lands, but a wound renders him impotent and his kingdom barren. Unable to walk or ride a horse, he is sometimes depicted as spending his time fishing while he awaits a “chosen one” who can heal him.

Some Maya, Inca and Aztec tribes sacrificed virgins to appease the gods each night just to ensure that the sun would rise.

Archetypes arise from the discovery of ancient myths. We owe a great debt to archaeologists excavating the past, while anthropologists, and scholars translate, analyse and interpret archaic artefacts. The fall of Rome and the devasting fire destroying the monumental library at Alexandria could have left us bereft of this cultural heritage except for the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople and the emerging Muslim religion.

It was the Moors from the who preserved and flourished during the early Middle Ages, which spanned the period from AD 500 to 1000. By the 9th century, the House of Wisdom contained the world’s largest library, and up to 500 scholars worked feverishly on their own discoveries.

The idea that the Earth was round, its circumference measurable, was no stranger here. Physicians investigated the causes of infection. The number zero, invented as a useful concept in India, reached Baghdad somewhere around AD 770 and became a crucial element in mathematics. Without zero there would never have been a computer, let alone Google.

The pleasure of harnessing knowledge spread rapidly across Arab North Africa, through refined cities like Fez, and beyond.

Meanwhile, in AD 711, those Muslims known in the West as Moors began pouring across the Strait of Gibraltar and took over the Iberian Peninsula. By AD 1000, most of what we now know as Spain was occupied by the Islamic Caliphate of Cordoba. Here rose the most enlightened and cultured area of Europe.

With the emergence of a renaissance in Europe from the 11th C., scholars from the north came to Spain to translate the classics of the antiquity into their vernacular languages.

Troubadour poets from Provence use allusions to Greek myths.

Various scholars from diverse fields excavated and examined Greek and Roman writing, recovering the ancient wisdom; our inherited past.

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough revealed the primitive origins of religion, magic, ritual and myth in 1890.

Frazer and others demonstrated the fear of fertility. Most cultures are fixated on the cycle of birth, life and death, especially in the vegetable world as it dictated the abundance of food. Any break in the cycle could bring famine. This became personified into a god/goddess – Demeter, Ceres, (Greek/ Roman) Tawaret, (Egyptian), Mama Ocllo, Inca,

Aztec, Mayan and Inca tribes daily sacrificed virgins simply to have the sun rise each day.

This gave rise to the archetype of crucifixion and resurrection. A young virile healthy king ensured productivity, an old sickly king could bring blight, famine or disease. The solution was to kill the king and appoint a new king at the beginning of each year. Kings eventually managed to find a way of making this ritual a symbolic one, to save their lives. Oedipus could be an example.

The first partial publication of The Epic of Gilgamesh appeared in 1912.

Many other scholars who explored the significance of myth to our literature include Northrop Frye and Carl Jung.

Other examples of archetypes and the symbolic meanings with which they tend to be universally associated are listed below:

Archetypal Images #

1.Water: the mystery of creation; birth-death-resurrection; purification and redemption; fertility and growth. According to Carl Jung, water is also the commonest symbol for the unconscious.

a. The Sea: the Mother of all Life; spiritual mystery, and infinity; death and rebirth; timelessness and eternity; the unconscious.

b. Rivers: also, death and rebirth (baptism); the flowing of time into eternity; transitional phases of the life cycle; incarnations of deities.

2. Sun (fire and sky are closely related): creative energy;

consciousness (thinking, enlightenment, wisdom, spiritual vision); father principle (moon and earth tend to be associated with female or mother principle); passage of time and life.

a. Rising Sun: birth; creation; enlightenment.

b. Setting Sun: death.

3. Colors:

a. Black (darkness): chaos (mystery, the unknown); death; the unconscious; evil; melancholy.

b. Red: blood, sacrifice; violent passion; disorder.

c. Blue: calm, authority, hope/despair

d. Green: growth; sensation; hope.

4. Numbers

Three: triangle, trinity

Four: life cycle, season, elements (earth, air, water, fire)

Five: four limbs and head, four cardinal points and centre.

Seven: union of three and four, the completion of a cycle, the perfect order.

5. Circle (sphere, egg): wholeness; unity;

God as Infinite; life in primordial form; union of consciousness and the unconscious— for example, the yang-yin of Chinese art and philosophy, which combines in the circle the yang (male) element (consciousness, life, light, and heat) with the yin (female) element (the un conscious, death, darkness, and cold).

6. The Archetypal Woman (including the Jungian anima):

a. The Great Mother, Good Mother, Earth Mother: associated with birth, warmth, protection, fertility, growth, abundance; the unconscious.

b. The Terrible Mother: the witch, sorceress, siren—associated with fear, danger, and death.

c. The Soul-Mate: the princess or “beautiful lady”—in carnation of inspiration and spiritual fulfillment.

7. Wind (and breath): inspiration; conception; soul or spirit.

8. Ship: microcosm; mankind’s voyage through space and time.

9. Garden: paradise; innocence; unspoiled beauty (especially feminine); fertility.

10. Desert: spiritual aridity; death; nihilism or hopelessness.

These examples are by no means exhaustive, but represent some of the more common archetypal images that the reader is likely to encounter in literature. He should also realize that the images we have listed do not necessarily function as archetypes every time they appear in a literary work; the discreet critic interprets them as such only if the total context of the work logically supports an archetypal reading.

ARCHETYPAL MOTIFS OR PATTERNS #

1. Creation: this is perhaps the most fundamental of all archetypal motifs; virtually every mythology is built on some account of how the Cosmos, Nature, and Man were brought into existence by some supernatural Being or Beings. Genesis in the Bible, Hesiod - The Theogony

2.Immortality: another fundamental archetype, generally taking one of two basic narrative forms:

a. Escape from Time: the “Return to Paradise,” the state of perfect, timeless bliss enjoyed by man before his tragic Fall into corruption and mortality.

b. Mystical Submersion into Cyclical Time: the theme of endless death and regeneration—man achieves a kind of immortality by submitting to the vast, mysterious rhythm of Nature’s eternal cycle, particularly the cycle of the seasons.

3. Hero Archetypes (archetypes of transformation and redemption)

a) The Quest: The Hero (Savior or Deliverer) undertakes some long journey during which he must perform impossible (tasks, battle with monsters, solve unanswerable riddles, and overcome insurmountable obstacles in order to save the \ kingdom and perhaps marry the princess.

(b. Initiation: The Hero undergoes a series of excruciating ordeals in passing from ignorance and immaturity to social and spiritual adulthood, that is, in achieving maturity and becoming a full-fledged member of his social group. The initiation most commonly consists of three stages or phases:

(1) separation, (2) transformation, and (3) return. Like the Quest, this is a variation of the Death-and-Rebirth archetype.

c. The Sacrificial Scapegoat: The Hero, with whom the welfare of the tribe or nation is identified, must die in order to atone for the people’s sins and restore the land to fruitfulness. Eventually Heroes used a substitute figure, often a goat, to transfer the corruption of the tribe and carry it off into the wilderness. The sacred sacrificial animal cleans, atones and purifies necessary for spiritual natural rebirth and rejuvenation.

Finally, in addition to appearing as images and motifs, archetypes may be found in even more complex combinations as genres or types of literature which conform with the major phases of the seasonal cycle.

In Fables of Identity (Harcourt, 1963), Northrop Frye provides the following table of archetypal phases with their correspondent literary types. (The reader may wish to consult Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism for an extended explanation of these categories.)

1.The dawn, spring and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival and resurrection, of creation and (because the four phases are a cycle) of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter and death.

Subordinate characters: the father and the mother. The archetype of romance and of most dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry.

2. The zenith, summer, and marriage or triumph phase. Myths of apotheosis, of the sacred marriage, and of entering into Paradise. Subordinate characters: the companion and the bride. The archetype of comedy and idyll.

3.The sunset, autumn and death phase. Myths of fall, of the dying god, of violent death and sacrifice and of the isolation of the hero. Subordinate characters: the traitor and the siren. The archetype of tragedy and elegy.

4.The darkness, winter and dissolution phase. Myths of the triumph of these powers; myths of floods and the return of chaos, of the defeat of the hero. . .. Subordinate characters: the ogre and the witch. The archetype of satire.

Professor Northrop Frye’s contribution takes us into the mythological approach to literary analysis. As our discussion of mythology has shown, the task of the myth critic is a special one. Unlike the traditional critic, who relies heavily on history and the biography of the writer, the myth critic is interested more in prehistory and the biographies of the gods. Unlike the formalistic critic, who concentrates upon the shape and symmetry of the work itself, the myth critic probes for the inner spirit which gives that form its vitality, its enduring appeal. And, unlike the Freudian critic, who is apt to see the hawk-chicken phenomenon cited in our introduction as symbolic of some form of sexual neurosis (perhaps the hawk is a father-image, and the coop a womb symbol), the myth critic assumes a broader perspective (he will seek to discover the prototypal hawk in whose image the model was carved and will look beyond our chicken to the primordial egg itself).

Yet, despite the special importance of the myth critic’s contribution, this approach is, for several reasons, relatively new and poorly understood. In the first place, only during the present century have the proper interpretive tools become available through the development of such disciplines as anthropology, psychology, and cultural history.

Second, many scholars and teachers of literature have remained sceptical of myth criticism because of its tendencies toward the cult and the occult.

A Handbook of Critical Approaches, Wilfred Guerin, Earle G. Labor, Lee Morgan, John R. Willingham. Harper Row, 2005.