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Myth and Thought Among the Greeks
Myth and Thought Among the Greeks
Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, first published in 1965 and translated into English in 1983, is Vernant’s programmatic statement of psychologie historique. The volume collects essays on the structural analysis of Greek myth, the representation of death in cult and image, technological thought, memory and time, and the emergence of philosophy from religious thought.
Part One reads Hesiod’s myth of the races as a structured opposition rather than a linear decline, showing that gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron map onto the tripartite functional scheme Dumézil identified in the broader Indo-European material. Part Three examines the kolossos — the rough-hewn funerary stele — as a psychic instrument that makes the dead present and absent at once, a double that belongs both to the visible world and to the beyond. Part Seven, “From Myth to Reason,” argues that Milesian cosmology “takes over, in its way, from religious thought” by locating itself in the invisible framework that religion had already posited behind the visible (Vernant 1983).
The work is load-bearing for the Lineage because it assembles the evidence that the categories of Greek psychology — memory, will, person, the imagination — were themselves historically constituted rather than given. Every subsequent Jungian reading of Homer, Hesiod, and the tragedians stands on this ground whether it acknowledges the debt or not.