Babylon enters the depth-psychology corpus along several distinct axes, each bearing its own interpretive weight. As a mythological and cosmological locus, Babylon names the city of Marduk, the ziggurat, and the bond between heaven and earth — a sacred center whose architecture encodes the cosmic hierarchy that Eliade, Campbell, and Jaynes each illuminate. As a symbolic antipode to Jerusalem, it functions in Edinger's Jungian reading of Revelation as the archetypal 'despicable city' — secular, captive-making, and destined for destruction — a shadow-projection of the sacred city onto the profane. In von Franz's alchemical commentary it descends further still, becoming the 'lake below,' the lacus inferior, the site of the unredeemed anima in matter, linked to confusion, concupiscentia, and the streams of lust. Jung's own citation of 'Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots' in Symbols of Transformation places the figure within the ambivalent archetype of the Terrible Mother — execrated yet fascinated. Armstrong and Jaynes situate historical Babylon as the crucible in which monotheism, bicameral collapse, and the transition to subjective consciousness were forged in exile. The term thus gathers around it the opposed poles of sacred center and profane captivity, cosmological axis and shadow city, civilizational achievement and psychic regression.
In the Hebrew scriptures the two great symbolic cities are Babylon and Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the holy, sacred city, and Babylon was the despicable, secular city, because it was the city of captivity.
Edinger establishes Babylon as the archetypal antithesis of Jerusalem — the profane, captive-making city whose symbolic destruction is transferred in Revelation onto Rome.
, Transformation of the God-Image: An Elucidation of Jung's Answer to Job, 1992thesis
In patristic literature Babylon was called lacus inferior (the lake below). This interpretation occurs also in the Acts of Cyriac, where Babylon is called a 'marshy sea,' full of 'hippo-centaurs,' dragons, and the great Uroboros.
Von Franz traces how alchemical and patristic exegesis converts Babylon into a symbol of the unredeemed anima in matter — a chthonic underworld of confusion, lust, and psychic captivity.
, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis
And upon her forehead was a name written: Mystery, Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.
Jung's citation of the Whore of Babylon from Revelation locates Babylon within the ambivalent archetype of the Terrible Mother — simultaneously execrated and desired.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952thesis
Babylon had many names, among them 'House of the Base of Heaven and Earth,' 'Bond of Heaven and Earth.' But it is always Babylon that is the scene of the connection between the earth and the lower regions.
Eliade establishes Babylon as a cosmological axis mundi — a sacred center connecting heaven, earth, and the subterranean chaos-waters — whose very names encode a tripartite cosmic structure.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954thesis
As they sat beside the rivers of Babylon, some of the exiles inevitably felt that they could not practice their religion outside the Promised Land... others were pushed into a new religious awareness.
Armstrong interprets the Babylonian exile as the historical crucible of Jewish monotheism, in which the destruction of cultic infrastructure forced a radical inward transformation of religious consciousness.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
The Ziggurat of Neo-Babylon, the Biblical Tower of Babel, was no god's house as in the truly bicameral age, but a heavenly landing for the now celestialized gods.
Jaynes reads the Neo-Babylonian ziggurat as evidence of the post-bicameral shift: gods are no longer immanent residents of earthly temples but celestialized beings whose return must be architecturally invited.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
Without battle, without slaughter, He caused him to enter Babylon, His city. Babylon He protected from affliction. Nabonidus the King, by whom Marduk had not been revered, Marduk delivered into Cyrus' power.
Campbell presents the Cyrus Cylinder as a mythological document in which Babylon figures as Marduk's own city — its conquest rendered as divine legitimation rather than military subjugation.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
Cyrus did not impose the Persian gods on his new subjects but worshipped at the Temple of Marduk when he entered Babylon in triumph.
Armstrong demonstrates how Babylon's fall to Cyrus paradoxically validated Yahwistic prophecy and inaugurated a new era of Jewish religious identity precisely through the city's symbolic defeat.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
The Amorites had conquered this Sumerian-Akkadian civilization and made Babylon their capital. Finally, some 500 years later, the Assyrians had settled in nearby Ashur and eventually conquered Babylon itself.
Armstrong situates Babylon historically as the successive capital of overlapping Near Eastern civilizations, establishing its cultural centrality as the medium through which Sumerian mythology passed into Canaanite and Israelite religion.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
The model for which is found in the royal festival of the new year, in the month of Nisan, in Babylon. At the end of a temporal cycle — a great year — the king must reaffirm his sovereign power.
Vernant links Babylon's New Year ritual drama — the king's reenactment of Marduk's victory — to the Greek mythological pattern of cosmic renewal, tracing the archetypal combat-and-creation motif across cultures.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
The moral 'making over' of the Babylonian-Sumerian account of the Flood into the biblical one — here again the Bible shows human presumption to be punished and the new creation to come from the hand of God.
Rank identifies the Babylonian Flood narrative as the mythological substrate transformed by the biblical redaction, reading this shift as the suppression of human creative agency in favor of divine sovereignty.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
For seventy-five years thereafter the mastery of the Near East was shared by the Medes, controlling the north, and the Babylonian Chaldean kings in the south.
Campbell contextualizes the rise of Neo-Babylonian power as the historical consequence of Assyrian karmic destruction, positioning Babylon as the inheritor of a devastated imperial world.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
Rome is not only the great prostitute but 'the mother of prostitutes' (17:5), and John wants his Christian readers to avoid her corrupting influence.
Thielman explicates how the Babylon-as-prostitute typology in Revelation deploys the biblical tradition of idolatrous Israel to configure Rome as the new embodiment of corrupting imperial power.
, Theology of the New Testament: A Canonical and Synthetic Approach, 2005supporting
In the middle of the precinct then was a tower of solid masonry, a furlong in length and breadth, upon which was raised a second tower, and on that a third, and so on up to eight.
Campbell cites Herodotus's description of the Babylonian ziggurat-temple to illustrate the sacred architecture encoding the graded stages of cosmic ascent from earth to heaven.
, The Mythic Image, 1974aside
Babylon, 9, 10, 88; names of, 14, 15 Babylonia, 50n, 53, 103, 107; celestial archetypes of cities, 7-8; cosmic cycles, 114n, 120, 122, 128; New Year ceremony, 55-58, 61, 65, 74.
An index entry cataloguing the multiple thematic domains — celestial archetypes, New Year ritual, cosmic cycles, and symbolism of the Center — through which Eliade treats Babylon across his study.
, The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, 1954aside