Jung has also been accused of basically reducing God to an element of consciousness, an accusation he attempted to refute by invoking the Kantian philosophical distinction between things as they truly are (“things in themselves,” or noumena) and things as we experience and know them (phenomena). We can only know the archetypes as we know them as objects of consciousness (phenomena), and this applies to God as much as any other archetype. But Jung holds that this does not mean that God only exists within our minds, for we can know nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God independent of us (as noumenon)—therefore, he argued, we cannot reduce God to a by-product of consciousness as Freud did.8
This argument, however, does not completely refute the charge that Jung has reduced religion and God to internal psychological realities. Although he allows for the possibility of a transcendent God, he also asserts that we can know nothing about this God (not even whether it exists independently of us), so God’s external existence is basically as irrelevant as the external historical existence of Jesus. What Jung says about God is entirely shaped by his psychological categories and his understanding of how they apply to God—for example, how God mirrors all aspects of human consciousness by modeling for us the integrated “Self,” as well as the male and female aspects of it (Animus and Anima) and its Shadow side.9
Jung’s approach remains a popular one in many circles and has been used by some scholars to analyze the mythological symbols in cinema, especially science-fiction films.10 It is my intention not to suggest that these studies are illegitimate but to indicate that such a Jungian approach to myth is limited in its focus due to its reductionist tendencies. This approach imposes general psychological categories on all cultures, insisting that the details of the individual myths are less important than their conformity to archetypal psychological patterns, alleged (without real evidence) to be universal in all cultures. Because myths are understood to be representative of the struggle for integrated wholeness or “individuation,” they tend to be seen as a function of this unconscious drive for self-discovery rather than, for example, an attempt to deal with the external encroachment of chaos on our lives (which Geertz identified as the fundamental task of religion). In Jung’s view, myths help us each embrace and integrate our own Self in all its aspects (Shadow, Anima, and Animus), but this is basically understood as an internal struggle rather than one that is related to our lives in our communities and world.
The approach of Joseph Campbell, who made use of Jung’s ideas, illustrates these problems even more clearly. Campbell probably did more to popularize mythology than any other modern scholar, thanks in part to Bill Moyers’s television series on him. Few people realize, however, the biases built into his approach. More so than Jung, Campbell simplified the nature and diversity of mythology by insisting that there really is only one myth (the “monomyth”), endlessly reproduced in cultures across the world, which exists as a model for the human journey of self-discovery. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell describes the structure of this myth as including a series of characteristic events: The hero is called to the adventure/quest. He initially refuses the call. He is convinced to go with the help of a figure who gives him supernatural aid. He passes the threshold of home and must survive combat with the monster. He enters the “belly of the whale” and is symbolically killed and reborn. He passes through a series of ordeals and tests of his character. He rescues the mother goddess. He is reconciled to his father. He destroys the monster and is united with the divine.11 Not all myths conform to this pattern, but Campbell works hard to make it seem as if they do, emphasizing those features that seem to fit and ignoring those that do not.12 He seems to have been influenced here by his early studies of medieval European literature, with its stories of chivalric romance, heroic knights battling dragons, and damsels in distress, so that he desired to find this the universal structure for all myths. He also claims that this myth is really about an internal struggle within ourselves, rather than any struggle with external realities, to a greater extent than Jung. He even belittles the problem of external suffering, claiming that the only problem exists within ourselves in our inability to deal with it; we deserve everything that happens to us, for (in an existentialist sense) we make our own universe.13 We can decide whether to suffer or not, in other words, so it does not really matter what goes on outside of our heads.
This complete reduction of the subject of myth to our internal psychological universe is abetted by Campbell’s philosophical monism, his belief that all reality is one and that there is ultimately no distinction between ourselves and the divine; this allows him to reduce all our experience of the world to an internal psychological matter. In his monism, it is not a transcendent reality with which we unite (as in Vedantic Hinduism), but rather all reality is reinterpreted as an aspect of the self, as in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy: the individual realizes he himself is the absolute, the creator, the center of his own universe.14 Campbell also rejects any resistance to this monism in the history of religion, such as the insistence of Western biblical religion on a transcendent God.15 In general, he prefers Eastern to Western religion, and he reserves particular venom for the Jewish claim to be the chosen people who have received a unique revelation from God.16 That this denigration of Judaism is tied to Campbell’s own anti-Semitism has been well documented by Robert Segal and Maurice Friedman, among others.17
By reducing myth to a product of the unconscious and a series of universally present archetypes, both Jung and Campbell risk losing the distinctiveness of individual myths as well as the meanings attributed to them by those who tell them. Myths seek to state something about the world, not just something about the psychology of those who tell them. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations are often largely fanciful, being based in speculations about the mind-set of peoples rather than any real empirical study, and they tend to impose one culturally specific set of psychological categories onto all cultures and religions.
Clifford Geertz on Myth and Sociological Reductionism
Many theorists of myth have avoided psychological reductionism but may fall prey to sociological reductionism instead. I have previously noted how Clifford Geertz sought a nonreductionistic anthropological method (which I am attempting to mimic), and he sometimes criticized his predecessors and their understandings of religion and myth—most notably Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. These sociologically oriented theorists tended to view religion and myth as expressions of social integration or social conflict and so effectively reduced myth to a by-product of social forces, not unlike Marx. Durkheim, the main founder of the sociological analysis of religion, essentially equated religion and society but in such a way that religion is reduced to a role of societal maintenance. This approach can admit that society shapes religion but not that religion can shape society as an independent cultural force, as Geertz claims it does.18 As for Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl, Geertz finds them engaged in opposed forms of reductionism. Malinowski essentially reproduces Durkheim’s view that myth is a “common sense” pragmatic strategy for societal maintenance, hence ignoring any transcendental function for myth in its purported connection to a mystical, extramundane reality. On the other hand, Lévy-Bruhl reduces the myth to the mystical only, claiming it has no relevance to pragmatic everyday matters because it involves a way of thinking that is totally alien or incomprehensible to outsiders, and for this reason, myth is essentially impervious to logical analysis.19 In contrast, Geertz insists that myth must function both pragmatically and mystically and that, in so doing, it can be reduced neither to merely a strategy for societal maintenance nor to an irrational and inexplicable mystery. In his view, myth connects the everyday (empirically real) world of social matters and “common sense” with the mystical (ideal or ultimately real) world of religion, even as it connects a view of how the world is with a moral vision of how it ought to be. There is considerable slippage between the two, as the myth portrays a model of how the world is believed to be, but this also corresponds to a model for how people would like it to be. We should