Demythologization

Demythologization enters the depth-psychology corpus chiefly through its confrontation with Rudolf Bultmann’s theological programme — the project of stripping Christian proclamation from its mythical framework so as to render it credible to modern scientific consciousness. Jung, Edinger, and Campbell each engage this programme, though from markedly divergent vantage points. Jung resists the conclusion that myth can or should be evacuated: for him, religio is irreducibly mythic in structure, and the anti-mythological trend signals not liberation but the exhaustion of belief under scientific rationalism. Edinger amplifies this resistance, showing that even ostensibly secular worldviews (materialism included) remain covertly mythological. Campbell absorbs the sociological fact of a demythologized world — the relegation of sacred myth to a secularized modernity’s waste — yet responds not with Bultmann’s hermeneutical reduction but with a counter-programme of remythologization through symbol and metaphor. Noel situates both Jung and Campbell within a longer history of de-mystification that does not debunk religion but attempts its natural history. Hillman’s archetypal psychology implicitly contests demythologization by insisting that the image requires no external grounding and that remythologizing, however philosophically contested, is therapeutically indispensable. Giegerich alone presses the dialectic further, arguing that positivized, imaginal ‘myths’ are themselves already demythologized abstractions incapable of meeting the depth of modern predicament. The term thus marks a genuine fault-line in the corpus between accommodation to modernity and its critique.

In the library 12 passages

demythologization had a strong impact on mid-twentieth-century religion. I mean the philosophical critiques that produced the widespread acknowledgement that contemporary cultures are no longer ruled by the religious establishments, that ‘what we have today is a demythologized world,’ one in which sacred myths are relegated to the garbage dumps of a profane or secularized modernity.

Noel identifies demythologization as a defining cultural force of mid-twentieth-century religion, characterising its outcome as the wholesale secularisation and disposal of sacred myth.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

another way in which demythologization had a strong impact on mid-twentieth-century religion. I mean the philosophical critiques that produced the widespread acknowledgement that contemporary cultures are no longer ruled by the religious establishments, that ‘what we have today is a demythologized world,’ one in which sacred myths are relegated to the garbage dumps of a profane or secularized modernity.

Campbell’s work directly confronts the demythologized condition of modernity, engaging the secularisation debate in parallel with theologians but without their vocabulary.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Theology must understand the task of stripping the proclamation from its mythical framework, of ‘demythologizing’ it… But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology, he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without ‘myth.’

Edinger juxtaposes Bultmann’s demythologizing programme with Jung’s counter-claim that myth is ineradicable from religious and even secular consciousness.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the anti-mythological trend is due to the difficulties we have in clinging on to our previous mythological tenets of belief… the aversion of the younger generation for mythology seems the natural outcome of the premise: we are tired of the excessive effort of having to believe, because the object of belief is no longer inherently convincing.

Edinger, citing Jung, diagnoses the anti-mythological impulse as a symptom of cognitive exhaustion rather than genuine intellectual liberation.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jung and Campbell fit into this, I submit, by participating in what might be called the history of the ‘de-mystification’ of religion… Jung’s and Campbell’s participation in this ‘de-mystification project’ does not involve the debunking of religion and religious belief associated with the Modern Enlightenment and its consequent ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world.

Noel carefully distinguishes Jung’s and Campbell’s de-mystification project from Enlightenment debunking, framing it instead as a natural history of religion that preserves mythic depth.

Noel, Daniel C., Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Jung and Campbell fit into this, I submit, by participating in what might be called the history of the ‘de-mystification’ of religion… Jung’s and Campbell’s participation in this ‘de-mystification project’ does not involve the debunking of religion and religious belief associated with the Modern Enlightenment and its consequent ‘dis-enchantment’ of the world.

The passage establishes that the de-mystification trajectory from Mythos to Logos does not culminate in demythologization as debunking, but as renewed comprehension of religion’s natural history.

Campbell, Joseph, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the task of referring the soul’s syndromes to specific myths is complex and fraught with dangers. It must meet the philosophical and theological arguments against remythologizing, arguments which would see our approach as a backward step into magical thinking, a new daemonology.

Hillman acknowledges the pressure of demythologizing arguments upon his remythologizing project, treating those arguments as challenges that depth psychology must actively answer.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Inasmuch as what goes under the name of myths does not refer to real myths and real Gods, they do not truly reach our afflictions… let alone our modern situation at large nor many of the great cultural phenomena and predicaments of our time, such as modern science, virtual reality, international high finance.

Giegerich argues that positivised, imaginal uses of myth are themselves a form of demythologization, incapable of addressing the depth of contemporary cultural predicaments.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a true understanding of myth must not take its description literally; on the contrary, it has the task of counteracting the textual exposition by reconstituting in our mind a unity that due to the necessities of the narrative form appears to be split apart in the myth.

Giegerich, drawing on Neoplatonism, argues that genuine myth-interpretation requires a logical move beyond the imaginal surface — a form of internal demythologization toward conceptual unity.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Here I join Owen Barfield and Norman Brown in a mafia of the metaphor to protect plain men from literalism… ‘the besetting sin today is the sin of literalism.’

Hillman’s anti-literalism converges with the impulse behind demythologization — rescuing symbolic content from naive concretism — while redirecting it toward the preservation rather than dissolution of mythic image.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

since it has always been on myths that the moral orders of societies have been founded, the myths canonized as religion, and since the impact of science on myths results — apparently inevitably — in moral disequilibration, we must now ask whether it is not possible to arrive scientifically at such an understanding of the life-supporting nature of myths.

Campbell frames the scientific impact on myth — the engine of demythologization — as producing moral disequilibration, and proposes a psychological understanding of myth as the remedy.

Campbell, Joseph, Myths to Live By, 1972aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Imagined so-called Gods are depotentiated, indeed castrated, Gods, ‘Gods’ reduced to manageable contents of consciousness; Gods as ‘metaphors for (modes of experience)’ are sublated former Gods.

Giegerich contends that the archetypal-psychological move of treating Gods as metaphors or images is itself a demythologizing reduction that castrates genuine divinity.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms