Mythos

Mythos is the Greek word for speech or story — and, in the depth tradition’s sense, for the mode of discourse that tells the psychological reality of the gods, the heroes, the underworld, and the transformations. The tradition distinguishes mythos from [[mythos-to-logos|logos]] not as truth from falsehood but as two registers of psychic knowing: mythos narrates what the soul undergoes in images; logos articulates what the discursive intellect can argue.

For the Seba tradition myth is not ornament. Jung reads the mythologems as the natural language of the collective unconscious; Kerényi reads them as the ancient phenomenology of archetypal experience; Hillman reads them as the soul’s native grammar. amplification — the analytic procedure of placing an image against its mythological parallels — presupposes that the mythological and the psychological share a substrate.

Relationships

• mythos-to-logos
• mythologem
• amplification
• karl-kerenyi