From Chapter 1: The Creation Myth

In this book I shall try to interpret motifs that occur frequently in creation myths. Creation myths are of a different class from other myths—hero myths or fairy tales, for instance—for when they are told there is always a certain solemnity that gives them a central importance; they convey a mood which implies that what is said will concern the basic patterns of existence, something more than is contained in other myths. Therefore, one may say that as far as the feeling and emotional mood which accompany them are concerned, creation myths are the deepest and most important of all myths. In many primitive religions the telling of the creation myth forms an essential teaching in the ritual of initiation. They are told to the young initiates as the most important part of the tribal tradition. In many other ways also, as we shall see later, they refer to the most basic problems of human life, for they are concerned with the ultimate meaning, not only of our existence but of the existence of the whole cosmos.

Because the origin of nature and of human existence is a complete mystery to us, the unconscious has produced many models of this event. The same thing happens wherever the human mind touches the borders of the unknown. If, for example, you look at maps of antiquity, Greece is shown more or less in the center of the map, but on the borderline things become a bit distorted and unknown; the upper part of Yugoslavia tends toward the upper part of Italy, and then at the end of a known area there is simply a drawing of the uroboros, the snake which eats its own tail, which on old maps also represents the ocean. As decoration, at the corners of the maps, there are pictures of animals or monsters, or of the four winds. In the Middle Ages the area of the known world was always shown in the center surrounded by all-embracing symbols and sometimes even demonic figures: the four winds blowing toward the center, heads with blowing mouths, or something similar. These maps demonstrate ad oculos that wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image.

The same applies in the case of medieval astronomical charts. In the Middle Ages they drew all the constellations they knew, and outside them the cosmos was surrounded by the Zodiac snake, the snake on which were all the signs of the Zodiac; beyond that lay the unknown. There again the snake which bites its own tail, the uroboros motif, comes up where man reaches the end of his conscious knowledge. In late antiquity, the beginnings of chemistry show that people also had certain knowledge of the elements and some technical knowledge, but when it came to the end of known facts, they again projected this archetypal image, the symbol of the uroboros, to characterize the mystery of unknown matter. In alchemy it was the symbol of the prima materia, of the original matter of the world.

Most of the questions as to the origin and substance of our cosmos have not been resolved for us; in spite of the increase of technical instruments, unknown factors still remain. There are archetypal models and projections of modern science which I shall discuss later, but we are still confronted with completely puzzling facts and with contradictory theories. Other civilizations have not been less naive than we, for they too fell into this hole of the unknown, and when confronted with a mystery, they projected mythological symbols out of which, among other things, the creation myths arose.

In order to explain what projection means, I would like to call your attention to Jung's definition of projection. One sees again and again that projection has not been really understood, but always gives rise to all sorts of misinterpretation. Jung says in his definitions at the end of Psychological Types:

Projection means the expulsion of a subjective content into an object; it is the opposite of introjection. Accordingly it is a process of dissimilation (v. assimilation), by which a subjective content becomes alienated from the subject and is, so to speak, embodied in the object. The subject gets rid of painful, incompatible contents by projecting them, as also of positive values which, for one reason or another—self-depreciation, for instance—are inaccessible to him. [Now comes the sentence which is important for us:] Projection results from the archaic identity of subject and object, but is properly so called only when the need to dissolve the identity with the object has already arisen. This need arises when the identity becomes a disturbing factor, i.e., when the absence of the projected content is a hindrance to adaptation and its withdrawal into the subject has become desirable.

We sometimes use the term projection in talking about primitive societies, saying that their myths and gods are projections of archetypal images. This leads to confusion, because in the society within which those Gods are still psychologically alive, the necessity has not yet arisen for the withdrawal of the projection. So there you really still have a state of archaic identity. It is only because we do not believe, say, in the Gods of the Shilluk of the Upper Nile that we may now speak of projection, but that is an indirect application of the term. We often clash with ethnologists, who say that it is not only a projection, that they have lived with such primitive people, and for them the Gods are a living reality, that you cannot just call them "only a projection." Such scientists have simply misunderstood how we use the word projection.

There is another reason why I would like to comment on this, but first I want to go on to the term archaic identity, which Jung uses and defines in the same book:

I use the term identity to denote a psychological conformity. It is always an unconscious phenomenon since a conscious conformity would necessarily involve a consciousness of two dissimilar things, and, consequently, a separation of subject and object, in which case the identity would already have been abolished. Psychological identity presupposes that it is unconscious. It is a characteristic of the primitive mentality and the real foundation of participation mystique, which is nothing but a relic of the original non-differentiation of subject and object, and hence of the primordial unconscious state. It is also a characteristic of the mental state of early infancy, and, finally, of the unconscious of the civilized adult, which, in so far as it has not become a content of consciousness, remains in a permanent state of identity with objects. . . . It is not an equation, but an a priori likeness which was never the object of consciousness.

Thus we must assume that in relatively early stages of our development there was no difference between our unconscious psyche and the outer world; they were in a state of complete equality, that is, archaic identity. Then certain mysterious psychic processes, mutations, took place which disturbed the peace of this identity and forced us to withdraw certain representations and see that they were inner not outer facts. We then always replace the idea about the outer facts with a new "projection," of which we do not yet see its subjective aspect.

As you will see when we study several creation myths, it is sometimes revealed very clearly to us that they represent unconscious and preconscious processes which describe not the origin of our cosmos, but the origin of man's conscious awareness of the world. This means that before I become consciously aware of the world as a whole, or of a part of my surroundings, a lot happens in my unconscious. The preconscious processes that take place in a human being before this awareness befalls him can be observed in dreams and in unconscious material: as an analyst you can sometimes see a fortnight ahead, or even longer, that now a new form of consciousness is approaching, but the dreamer has not as yet any realization of it. It is like a annunciation of a process in consciousness which appears in the dream but has not yet taken place within reality. A fortnight later the dreamer will come and say: "Now I understand, now I have realized something," but you saw in the dream that this new understanding, this sudden realization, was prepared some time ago in preconscious processes. I give this now as an a priori statement but hope to demonstrate it in a convincing way when we look at the creation myths.