Eliade and Jung — Convergence on the Symbol

The retrieved material establishes a convergence between Eliade’s phenomenology of religion and carl-jung‘s analytical psychology that is more than thematic. The two projects arrive at a common object — the symbol as a structure that unites two orders of reality — from opposite starting points.

Jung works from the clinic outward: the dream, the fantasy, the complex reveal themselves as mythologically structured, and the mythological corpus of world culture becomes the amplificatory apparatus by which the clinical image is read. Eliade works from the ethnographic archive inward: the rituals, myths, and sacred objects of the world’s religions reveal themselves as structured by a small set of recurring patterns (hierophany, illud tempus, cosmogonic repetition, initiatory death and rebirth), and those patterns are found to persist beneath the secular forms of modern life. “A great part of [profane man’s] existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the ‘unconscious’” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

The convergence is load-bearing for Seba. It means that the tradition’s claim — that the soul’s reality is not optional — is not a thesis advanced by a single school but the common finding of two independent investigations. The depth psychologist and the historian of religions meet in the same place, having approached from opposite sides of the same mountain.

Sources

• mircea-eliade: homo religiosus is the ancestor of all living persons; the sacred persists beneath secular forms; the unconscious is the name modernity gives to what religion names the sacred.
• carl-jung: the symbol is a natural phenomenon; the collective unconscious is structured as myth; individuation is the psyche’s own cosmogony.