Essays on a Science of Mythology

Rating:
Summary: Jaspers, Stekel, Adler, Freud, Jung...???
Review: Certainly not to "praise great men," which is anathema to me, but to trace and track the "development of psychology." That is why I have observed its serpentine journey throughout history, slinking as far back as Heraclitus, now rising up into the Aquarian Age, right through Pisces, which brings us to the next development in psychology, Archetypal Psychology, as presented by James Hillman, Jung's worthy successor, which leads the "pupil" for "dominating spirit" to "receptive soul" and beyond, or below, to an ultimately gracious union of the two. At the end of this book by the two Carls, Kerenyi says, "Miracle DO happen in Eleusis," and Eleusis, like Utopia, like the Realm of the Mothers, like the Spirit Realm, is DOWN, the very direction in which Hillman points, always, as does Joseph Campbell, e.g., "If you are falling...DIVE!"

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing.
Review: This collaboration between Jung and Kerenyi is everything except science.
In the first part, Kerenyi only summarizes folktales and sagas from Iceland till India about the Divine Child. His second contribution should be considered as a preparatory study on his eminent work 'Eleusis'. But the quality of this study lays way behind this latter work.
The contributions of Jung are trivial or a variation on his favourite theme. E.g. "The mythological images belong to the structure of the unconscious and are an impersonal possession; in fact, the great majority of men are far more possessed by them than possessing them." (p.161)
Or, "... it is readily understandable that the primordial image of the hermaphrodite should reappear in modern psychology in the guise of the male-female antithesis, in other words as male consciousness and personified female unconscious." (p.95)

Although the two touch on two, for me, important items, though obviously they don't explore them further.
First, many symbols are based on, as they call them, 'cosmic origins' (p. 16), in other words on the zodiac, thus on nothing. And second, do folktales point in the direction of mythology or merely to a realistic description of a certain type of human fate? (p.34)
I believe that folktales are more like ancient theatre: escape from the harsh reality. The second option is to be preferred.
Reading this book, reminds me of the words of Jean Fourastié, who characterized certain theories as 'délires conceptuels' (conceptual deliriums). I feel that a 'science' of mythology is one of these deliriums, what doesn't mean that mythology has nothing to say. On the contrary, see the above mentionned work 'Eleusis' by Kerenyi. But it is not a science.