Divine Child

The mythologem of the child-god — the figure who is orphaned, abandoned, invincible, and both beginning and end. Kerényi’s philological study The Primordial Child in Primordial Times surveys the figure across Vogul, Finnish (Kullervo), Indic (Narayana), and Greek (Apollo, Hermes, Zeus, Dionysus) materials, and Jung’s companion essay — The Psychology of the Child-Archetype — reads the figure as an archetype with a specific phenomenology: the abandonment of the child, the invincibility of the child, the hermaphroditism of the child, the child as beginning and end (Jung and Kerényi 1949).

The child-archetype is not a single myth repeated but a structural figure of psyche. Kerényi opens the Prolegomena by refusing to reduce mythology to its sources: “We have lost our immediate feeling for the great realities of the spirit — and to this world all true mythology belongs” (Jung and Kerényi 1949, Prolegomena). Recovering the child-archetype is recovering a phenomenology the modern mind has forgotten how to feel.

The figure is neighbor to the puer aeternus in its Jungian-core elaboration (Marie-Louise von Franz) and to the heroic-hero’s infant exposure in Greek saga. It is one of the mythologems in which Kerényi and Jung most explicitly work as one organ.

Relationships

• archetypal-image
• hermes
• individuation
• kore

Primary sources

• jung-kerenyi-essays-science-mythology (Jung and Kerényi 1949)