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Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries
Essays on a Science of Mythology
The Jung–Kerényi collaboration, issued as Bollingen Series XXII in 1949. The book pairs Kerényi’s philological studies — Prolegomena, The Primordial Child in Primordial Times, and Kore — with Jung’s psychological amplifications: The Psychology of the Child-Archetype and The Psychological Aspects of the Kore. Kerényi closes the volume with the Epilegomena: The Miracle of Eleusis.
The book’s importance to the Lineage is structural. Kerényi writes the Greek-religious recovery; Jung reads the same figures back as psychic structures. The child-archetype and the Kore emerge as mythologems that belong at once to religious history and to the phenomenology of the psyche. In his Prolegomena, Kerényi insists that “we have lost our immediate feeling for the great realities of the spirit — and to this world all true mythology belongs” (Jung and Kerényi 1949), and the book is the attempt to restore that feeling by scholarly means that do not destroy what they examine.
The volume is the single clearest demonstration in the library that the classical-philological wing and the Jungian wing of the Lineage work as one organ when they are both doing their proper work.