Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis

Carl Gustav Jung, Carl Kerenyi

V The Psychological aspects of the Kore, page 225

Demeter and Kore, mother and daughter, extend the feminine consciousness both upwards and downwards. They add an “older and younger,” “stronger and weaker” dimension to it and widen out the narrowly limited conscious mind bound in space and time, giving it intimations of II greater and more comprehensive personality which has a share in the eternal course of things. We can hardly suppose that myth and mystery were invented for any conscious purpose; it seems much more likely that they were the involuntary revelation of a psychic, but unconscious, pre-condition. The psyche pre-existent to consciousness (e.g. in the child) participates in the maternal psyche on the one hand, while on the other it reaches across to the daughter psyche. vVe could therefore say that every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and that every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter. This participation and intermingling give rise to that peculiar uncertainty as regards time: a woman lives earlier as a mother, later as a daughter. The conscious experience of these ties produces the feeling that her life is spread out over generations-the first step towards the immediate experience and conviction of being outside time, which brings with it a feeling of immortality. 225 The individual’s life is elevated into a type, indeed it becomes the archetype of woman’s fate in general. This leads to restoration or apocatastasis of the lives of her ancestors, who now, through the bridge of the momentary individual, pass down into the generations of the future. An experience of this kind gives the individual a place and a meaning in the life of the generations, so that all unnecessary obstacles are cleared out of the way of the life-stream that is to flow through her. At the same time the individual is rescued from her isolation and restored to wholeness. All ritual preoccupation with archetypes ultimately has this aim and this result. It is immediately clear to the psychologist what cathartic and at the same rejuvenating effects must flow from the Demeter cult into the feminine psyche, and what a lack of psychic hygiene characterizes our culture, which no longer knows the kind of wholesome experience afforded by Eleusinian emotions. I take full account of the fact that not only the psychologically minded layman but the professional psychologist and psychiatrist as well, and even the psychotherapist, do not possess an adequate knowledge of their patients’ archetypal material, insofar as they have not specially investigated this aspect of the phenomenology of the unconscious. For it is precisely in the field of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic observation that we frequently meet with cases characterized by a rich crop of archetypal symbols.