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Mythologem

Mythologem

Mythologem is Kerényi’s technical term for the typical, durable narrative-form through which the human psyche has always known itself — the unit of mythology proper, as phoneme is the unit of speech. A mythologem is not an allegory, not a belief, and not a literary motif; it is “an activity of the psyche externalised in images” (Kerényi 1951, p. 3), sui generis, comparable in directness of image only to dreams.

Kerényi develops the term in correspondence with Thomas Mann and uses it as the methodological centre of Essays on a Science of Mythology (1949), The Gods of the Greeks (1951), and the Bollingen Archetypal Images in Greek Religion series. Dreams and mythology, he insists, stand nearer to one another than dreams and poetry do: “The degree of directness of the images presented in dreams and in mythology is, to say the least, very much the same” (Kerényi 1951, p. 3). Mythology is thus “collective psychology” — not because it is a projection of collective mood, but because it is the psyche’s own shared image-repertory prior to any individual’s use of it.

The mythologem is plotted: even an archaic hymn-poet “was tied to a definite ‘plot’ for any story that he wished to tell about the god” (Kerényi 1951, p. 11). The Deed of Kronos, Aphrodite’s situation between Ares and Hephaistos, Hermes’s “need for discovery and invention — which means invention also in the sense of deceit” — these are not the products of “a personal psychology” but of “humanity at a more general and impersonal level” (Kerényi 1951). The mythologem is what makes philology into psychology without collapsing either discipline into the other: it is the primitive datum both fields read.

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