European Pagan Memory Day

There are several theories and discoveries that, though born in different research fields, contributed and still contribute to the renewal and to the construction of a pagan consciousness nowadays. Among these, the Jungian psychoanalysis, which helped more than the Freudian one in bringing back to life and among us the ancient Gods. It’s no accident that Karoly Kerenyi was a friend of Jung’s and wrote with him the Essays on the Science of Mythology. Kerenyi is probably one of the most known authors for those who want to know more about paganism as renewal of classical religions nowadays; other writers are James Hillman and Ginette Paris, both with a Jungian education and really important for modern pagans.

I can’t make here a commentary on Jungian psychoanalytic theories, but just look at some of their features, those which most helped the Gods in finding again a place in our everyday life.

First of all the matter of the Libido: Freud defined the libido as the sex urge on which a person’s psychic life is focused. At the centre of the psyche, according to Freud, there is the sex istinct; while Jung, on the contrary, defined as libido not only the sex urge, but all the urges of man toward something that is not necessarily sex. Not all the instinct of man are focused around sexuality.

Then, there is the matter of the unconscious: according to Freud, it is an empty tank, filled after the birth with every sort of thing removed by the rational mind; according to Jung there’s something in the unconscious even before the birth, because aside an individual unconscious there’s also a collective unconscious, a memory of the human race from which the archetypes, symbolic models, are derived.

Certainly both the psychoanalytic and the scientific-biological studies went over these two features: today we know that many features we used to attribute to the temperament or to the gender are actually the result of the education or the parents’ behavior, that is transmitted also to the phoetus. Jung, like other thinkers, must be considered carefully, inside the development of a pagan path, but this is true for all thinkers. It’s true, for example, for Georges Dumezil, another fundamental writer for modern pagans, who wrote when historians and archaeologists believed India and the Sanskrit civilization to be the origin of European civilizations. When writing this page, in 2011, the 25th anniversary of Dumezil’s and the 50th of Jung’s deaths recur.

Therefore Jung gave his contribution to the awake of a Pagan consciousness by leaving us some theoretical tools that allowed us to develop an idea of paganism very different from what the monotheism wanted to: by including in the idea of libido not only sexual urges but all urges, religion included, he reflected someway the integration between different deities in a same polytheistic pantheon, while the idea of an archetype, a model existing in a collective unconscious, led some of Jung’s successors to define these archetypes through classical mythology.

Actually, the symbolism in monotheism is quote poor and so the classical Gods gained an apparent survival under the guise of allegories all across Europe. How can the sea, or the dominion on the sea, or the water in general be represented if not by sculpting a Neptune on a fountain or in front of the Arsenal’s door in Venice? In the Bible, Moses too can separate water, but he’s never used to represent the sea; according to the monotheistic religious logic, all this power comes from god so we should depict god to represent the earth, the sea and everything, but even this should not be correct since the monotheistic god is not the earth, nor the sea. Christian saints, even though they have often been invented or used to delete the memory of Pagan deities or to assume their functions, never had as much influence on people’s imagination as the Pagan deities had.

That’s why some Jungian scholars turned to classical religions in order to represent or describe the urges of Human psyche. Karoly Kerenyi wasn’t a psychoanalyst and he dealt with the interpretation of myth: the myth should be nevermore considered as a primitive explanation of natural phenomena or a way to gain power on people through fear. Especially two scholars, James Hillman and Ginette Paris developed Jungian theories in a way that fits the renewal of a Pagan consciousness, that is the renewal of a way of living paganism and not an intellectual praise of it.

James Hillman wrote “The Hellenic polytheistic complexity hints at our complicated and unexplored psychic situations” in his Pan and the nightmare; in his writings he focused on archetypes and ideas, often expressed even in his books’ titles through characters of Greek mythology: apart from the Pan and the nightmare, there’s also Aphrodite’s justice, that begins with an invocation to the Goddess.

Ginette Paris like Hillman deals with the myth as a mirror of psychology. In her writings she also faces the bad aspects of monotheism. She took part to feminist and ecologist movements and found out these ideas again inside Greek polytheism. An example of her works are Pagan meditations and Pagan grace.

On other pages, we’ll publish a short bibliography of their works, together with others who gave their contribution to the renewal of a Pagan consciousness across the 20th century.

Manuela Simeoni

30.01.2011