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Creation Myths
Creation Myths
Creation Myths gathers marie-louise-von-franz‘s lectures at the C.G. Jung Institute on cosmogonic imagery as the symbolic substrate of psychic genesis. The premise is that the imagery in which a tradition narrates the creation of the world is not cosmology in our modern sense but phenomenology: a symbolic record of the emergence of consciousness from the unconscious matrix. The cosmic egg, the primordial chaos, the separation of the world parents, the fire-bringer, the Deus Faber — each names a stage or aspect of the same process in which ego takes shape against unconscious ground.
Von Franz’s method here is pure amplification: a motif is read against its full archive of parallels — Polynesian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Hermetic, Gnostic, Christian, Taoist — until the structure beneath the particular tale shows itself. The index gathers the recurring figures: the cosmic egg, the Einfall or sudden creative flash, enantiodromia, the giants as pre-differentiated contents, the trickster as first maker (von Franz 1995). She treats mircea-eliade‘s The Forge and the Crucible and The Myth of the Eternal Return as parallel sources.
The work stands with erich-neumann‘s neumann-origins-history-consciousness as the two canonical Jungian accounts of the cosmogonic paradigm. Where Neumann writes a single developmental arc, von Franz writes the comparative anatomy of the paradigm across traditions. The two readings are complementary: the arc and the archive.