Are Myths a Purer form of Archetypal Expression than Religious Creeds?

Artist: Jake Baddeley

To determine if a myth is a purer expression of an archetype than a religious creed, we must first define the difference between a religious creed and an archetype. Freud tracks three criteria of the mythological gods and their use by civilizations, which followed a mythological progression into a religious narrowing: “Now that God was a single person, man’s relations to him [God] could recover the intimacy and intensity of the child’s relation to his father” (p. 696).

     We can begin to see the drift from myth into a collective projection of the personal unconscious, into Campbell's monomyth, from the archetypal, into the Abba [Father] god of religions. Here we can deduce meaning from Paris: “seeing through to one’s myth is what allows room for transformation …” (p. 212). “But the idea of deity is not an intellectual idea, it is an archetypal idea” (Jung, p. 346). Jung explains further, “that is a numinous experience, and that is the thing people are looking for, an archetypal experience that gives them an incorruptible value … They [archetypes] have nothing in themselves (p. 347).” 

     A myth speaks in images; creed speaks in propositions or interpretations of the mythologem it constellates. Myth is imaginal speech, the native tongue of the collective unconscious. A creed is conceptual speech, the negotiated language of the collective conscious. Creeds are what happen when myth is codified, domesticated, and moralized—a byproduct—the numinous becomes a doctrinal statement. Myths arise from the unadulterated depths where instinct and imagination fuse into symbol. They do not try to explain the divine; they display it. A myth does not defend itself. It does not require belief. It simply is. Therefore, mythological stories are closer to the realm of archetypes than religious creeds. Thus, purity must favor the pre-ordinate. 

References

Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton University Press.

Freud, S. (1995). Instincts and their vicissitudes; Repression; The unconscious. In P. Gay (Ed.), The Freud reader. W. W. Norton & Company.

Jung, C. G. (1977). C. G. Jung speaking: Interviews and encounters (R. F. C. Hull, Ed.). Princeton University Press/Bollingen Series.

Paris, G. (1990). Psyche and symbol: A psychological approach to modern mythology. Spring Publications.