The Seba library treats Elementargedanken Und Vlkergedanken in 8 passages, across 4 authors (including Campbell, Joseph, von Franz, Marie-Louise, Edinger, Edward F.).
To describe the universal aspect, he coined the term Elementargedanke, the elementary idea. Of course, there’s no such thing as an elementary idea presenting itself to you raw; it always comes in terms of
Campbell presents Bastian’s coinage of Elementargedanke as the foundational term for the universal substrate of mythological imagery, while insisting it is always mediated by local, ethnic inflection.
, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004thesis
Compare Adolf Bastian’s theory of the ethnic ‘Elementary Ideas,’ which, in their primal psychic character (corresponding to the Stoic Logoi spermatikoi), should be regarded as ‘the spiritual (or psychic) germinal dispositions out of which the whole social structure has been developed organically’
Campbell cites Bastian’s Ethnische Elementargedanken directly, aligning the elementary idea with both the Stoic logos spermatikos and Boas’s thesis of universal mental unity, thus grounding the concept in psychobiological necessity.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015thesis
Another scholar, Adolf Bastian,
Von Franz situates Bastian in the genealogy of scholars who sought to explain the recurrence of universal motifs in folklore and fairy tale, preparing the ground for the Jungian archetype theory.
, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970supporting
Jung, on the other hand, gives stress in his interpretations of both dreams and myth not so much to history and biography as to biology and those initiations into the nature and sense of existence that all, in the course of a lifetime, must endure.
Campbell contrasts Jung’s biological-archetypal orientation with Freud’s historical-biographical one, mapping the theoretical space within which Bastian’s Elementargedanken finds its Jungian translation.
, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting
The chicks’ reaction to a real or constructed hawk exemplifies what Jung calls an archetype: a symbol releasing energy in terms of a collective image.
Campbell uses the ethological concept of the imprint versus the stereotyped response to illustrate the distinction between culturally particular (Völkergedanken) and species-universal (Elementargedanken) psychic responses.
, Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, 2004supporting
Bastian, Adolf, 11, 13, 19, 31, 80, 99, 109
The index entry confirms the centrality and recurrence of Bastian’s name—and by extension his Elementargedanken/Völkergedanken framework—throughout Campbell’s Inner Reaches of Outer Space.
, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, 1986supporting
God is one and the same with Reason, Fate, and Zeus…. he transformed the whole of substance through air into water, and just as in animal generation the seed has a moist vehicle, so in cosmic moisture God, who is the seminal reason of the universe logos spermatikos, remains behind in the moisture
Edinger’s exposition of the Stoic logos spermatikos provides the ancient philosophical antecedent to which Campbell explicitly compared Bastian’s Elementargedanken, illuminating the concept’s deep genealogy.
, The Psyche in Antiquity, Book One: Early Greek Philosophy From Thales to Plotinus, 1999aside
the same basic conceptions of the body, the mind and the soul which can be traced in our earliest evidence for the Greeks and Romans and the Celtic, Slavonic, Germanic and other ‘Indo-european’ peoples are to be seen also in early Egypt and Babylonia and among the Jews.
Onians independently documents the cross-cultural recurrence of foundational psychic conceptions, lending ethnographic support to the universalist premise underlying Bastian’s Elementargedanken without invoking the term directly.
, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside