Jung, Evola, Guenon : GAME OVER

[Anonymous No.15695934]

The concept of primordial tradition, which would explain the correspondence of human myths, has just been definitively refuted. As might be expected, it was only magical thinking.

I translate https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-des-religions/article/2020/06/21/pourquoi-certains-mythes-sont-communs-a-l-humanite-entiere_6043614_6038514.html :

Thanks to cutting-edge technologies, researchers Jean-Loïc Le Quellec and Yuri Berezkin have unravelled the enigma of the similarities between mythologies thousands of kilometres and years apart.
Why do myths have similarities from one end of the globe to the other? Anthropologists, philosophers and psychoanalysts first assumed that they reveal psychological invariants, mental representations common to all humanity. However, specialists in mythology have formulated another hypothesis: these myths spread, either through very ancient migrations or through exchanges between cultures.
How, then, can we explain the discovery of almost identical oral narratives on both sides of the Bering Strait? The peoples of America and the Eurasian continent were almost entirely separated between prehistory and colonization. Charles-Félix-Hyacinthe Gouhier, Count of Charencey, noted in 1892 that the Iroquois had stories similar to the myth of Orpheus, a poet who had descended into the Underworld: "We would gladly see, in his journey to the underworld in search of Eurydice, a legend going back to Paleolithic times and which, at a time impossible to specify, was transported to Canada. "With remarkable foresight, the Count concluded: "It is chiefly through the study of folklore and ancient folklore that we may be able to see the relationships that once existed between populations separated by both time and space. »
Following him, many anthropologists, not least Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss, wondered about comparable cases. The first explanation considered was that of a "diffusion" from one people to another. It led the Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne and German scholars such as Leo Frobenius and Fritz Gräbner to the cartographic study of the diffusion of certain cultural traits, including myths. Unfortunately, the use of this approach has led to many excesses, leading, for example, to the conclusion that tales from all over the world originated in India, Egypt, or Babylonian astrology. Such works, based on superficial and decontextualized comparisons, have led other authors to overvalue the historical particularities of each culture, denying any borrowing that cannot be explained by direct contact.

[Anonymous No.15695940]

>>15695934
This research can be used to reconstruct a history of beliefs since the Upper Paleolithic.
In the 2000s, the creation of huge databases based on the analysis and referencing of thousands of myths, such as those built by Yuri Berezkin or Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, coupled with a geographic information system, made it possible to rapidly map the distribution of mythological narratives or motifs on a global scale. The size of these databases is out of all proportion to those of their predecessors: Yuri Berezkin's corpus contains more than 2,264 motifs from over 934 peoples around the world; Jean-Loïc Le Quellec's contains more than 5,000 myths from 1,700 peoples. Their work showed that the distribution of myths was far from random, and could be used to reconstruct a history of beliefs since the Upper Paleolithic.
Let us take two myths about the origin of humanity: that of the primordial emergence of mankind and animals from underground, and that of an opponent spitting on the clay statuettes fashioned by the creator, leading to the appearance of disease and eventual death. How can we explain their strictly complementary distribution? The myth of the Emergence must have appeared in Africa and has spread worldwide, no doubt led by our species during the first trips out of Africa. Then the myth of the "Dirty Body" appeared in Eurasia, after the settlement of the Americas since it is not found there, and partly covered the area of diffusion of the previous one.
This is just one example. There are many myths present on both sides of the Bering Strait whose similarity is easily identifiable. This similarity and permanence over time has led to the establishment of "phylogenetic" trees of myths and mythological traditions. As with living species, it is now possible to determine the probability that one myth has common origins with another, and thus trace their genealogies.
This advance in science has definitively buried Carl Gustav Jung's approach to myths. By noting the similarities between myths around the world, the famous psychoanalyst had indeed assumed that there were a limited number of primordial images at work in the collective unconscious (spirits, fairies, ogres, etc.), which would explain, by virtue of the uniqueness of the human mind, the similarity of certain stories around the world. However, distribution maps show that no myth is universal, provided it reaches a minimum threshold of complexity, and that their distribution, which is never random, can be explained neither by the resurgence of archetypes nor by the action of approaching socio-economic conditions.
This advance in science has definitively buried the Jungian approach to myths.

[Anonymous No.15695947]

>>15695934
>>15695940
Myths have a history as old as mankind. In its long march, our species has spread stories, beliefs, sometimes changing them, often forgetting them. Reinvention is an integral part of this process, leading from yesterday to today's myths. For Le Monde des religions, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec and Yuri Berezkin exchange exclusively on these fundamental discoveries.
How would you define the word "myth"?
Jean-Loïc Le Quellec. In the proper sense of the Greek word, it is a "narrative", whatever its form, content or validity. But the word has come to designate, in common parlance, a false or delirious story, whereas for mythologists it refers to a particular type of narrative tradition: those that, among all the peoples of the world, expose the origin and the reason for things. In this sense, these narratives always tell the truth about the world, at least in the eyes of the peoples among whom they are told, and it is always others who regard them as myths. Otherness is a necessary condition for the recognition of myths.
Yuri Berezkin. For my part, I have always tried not to mix science and "myths". Besides, in my articles, I never use this word. I write about "mythology" and "folklore". It seems to me more correct to distinguish two major groups: on the one hand, episodes related to cosmology and those that explain the origin of a rite or a culture, and on the other hand, episodes related to the adventures of a hero, not related to a particular way of representing the world.
Where does your interest in comparative mythology come from?
YB. I became interested in it in the 1970s, looking for parallels in some of the representations present on Mochica ceramics between the Andes and the Amazon. At that time, the "Moscow-Tartu" school of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov, was trying to define culture as a type of symbolic activity. It deeply influenced my generation in Russia. Their ideas were quite controversial, but it was a non-Marxist and innovative perception of the world.
JLLQ. I first recorded oral traditions - tales, songs, localized legends... - in Poitou and Anjou in the 1970s. Then I lived in Libya, where I continued this work after learning Arabic, while beginning to take an interest in rock art. I continued this research in Quebec and Ethiopia and, after understanding that it was all part of mythology in the broadest sense, I gradually broadened my perspective to other regions of the world.

[Anonymous No.15695952]

>>15695934
>>15695940
>>15695947
How do you reconstruct the story of a motif or myth?
YB. I examine its area of distribution and try to make sense of it. We know, for example, that America was populated by Asians, when and how. If people give similar names to the Big Dipper in Siberia and North America, we can be pretty sure that such names existed in Siberia 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, or even earlier, and that they moved from one continent to another during the last great ice age.
JLLQ. A geographical map is frozen history. With "areology", the study of the areas where myths spread and their motifs, the method of which Yuri has just explained, we can hope to elucidate part of their history, or at least build hypotheses about it. For example, the distribution map of the myth of "The Primordial Emergence of Humanity" and that of the "Sullied Body" - both of which explain the origin of humanity and that of death - cannot be due to chance or an archetype, as they are complementary. It is most likely that the second myth appeared more recently than the first, and that its spread has partly overlapped with that of the first.
Are there other methods that you find interesting?
JLLQ. Ideally, I would use several completely different methods to compare their results. If they converge, that makes them more robust. You have to conduct "text explanations" that use all the cultural and sociological facts available to understand the meaning of a myth and cross-reference them with areology. The digital revolution has recently allowed the mythologist to enrich his toolkit. Huge amounts of data can be processed quickly using simple commercial computers, and open-source software makes it possible to apply the tools of phylogeneticists to myths and folklore, which establish relationships between living species, provided that the corpus is as complete as possible and that the stories can be adequately coded. In this way, the history of certain myths and motifs can be reconstructed following verifiable procedures.
YB. I use a statistical method, factor analysis, which reduces a set of observed variables to a smaller number of unobserved variables. My main concern is therefore to read and classify tens of thousands of texts, because no one else will ever do it. Without a proper database, there is nothing to analyze.

[Anonymous No.15695957]

>>15695952
"In early Bronze Age cultures on the steppe, a myth already described the creation of human figures by God, and the attempt of an antagonist to destroy them. »
What discoveries have you made thanks to these new methods?
YB. My research argues for language development prior to 70,000 years. It also shows that an Indo-Pacific component was involved in the settlement of America. But my favourite result remains the reconstruction of the Indo-European myth: in the cultures of the Early Bronze Age in the steppe (around 3000 B.C.E., N.D.L.R.), a myth already described the creation of human figures by God, and the attempt of an antagonist to destroy them.
JLLQ. For my part, the most important contribution of comparative mythology seems to me to be the possibility of finding at least the framework of the myths of the Upper Paleolithic, between about 45,000 and 12,000 years ago, that is to say, the period when the Franco-Cantabrian caves (southern France and northern Spain) were decorated, which opens up the possibility of linking myths and images in an argumentative way. This opens up unprecedented avenues of interpretation of prehistoric art!
YB. I disagree. In my opinion, European Palaeolithic art cannot be interpreted. Nothing is known about the spiritual world of its creators, and no living culture has succeeded theirs. There are only a few interesting but isolated episodes in the Irish tradition and a brilliant, but essentially late mythology in the mythological manuscripts of the Edda in Scandinavia.
JLLQ. Admittedly, only a small part of the Paleolithic mythology can be accessed. It is not a question of finding the original myths, but of identifying the existence of certain major mythical themes at that time. This is notably the case of the vast "Eurasian-American Indian" material explored by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bernard Sergent and yourself, who show, and I quote, that "all the distant intercontinental links revealed by our research are based on the distribution of the only motifs that could have been known to the hunter-gatherers of the late Paleolithic and brought to America through Northeast Asia and Alaska".
"No doubt the instrumentalization of folklore by the Vichy regime made this area suspect of political ulterior motives for some. »

[Anonymous No.15695964]

>>15695957
Why is this revolution in comparative mythology so little recognized in the scientific community?
YB. Firstly, because archaeology and genetics provide such rich data on the human past that anthropologists have logically focused their efforts on the present or (psychological) permanence. Second, because during the years 1910-1920, Franz Boas shifted his interest from history to psychology, which profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology. Finally, after the collapse of German science in 1945, and the loss of influence of Russian anthropology, both of which were historical, the influence of the English, French and especially American schools became overwhelming. In order to change this situation, specialists in comparative mythology must gain self-confidence and develop ideas that have a future.
JLLQ. In reality, there is indeed an international scientific community of researchers in comparative mythology. On the other hand, and in France in particular, it lacks institutional recognition. This comes from a profound ignorance of everything concerning mythology. This ignorance sometimes borders on contempt. No doubt the instrumentalization of folklore by the Vichy regime has, for some, made this field suspect of political ulterior motives.
Do you believe that comparative mythology reveals ancestral wisdom?
YB. It teaches us new things about the prehistory of man and is similar to archaeology and comparative linguistics. The quest for knowledge does not need to be motivated by anything other than itself. It is therefore useless to seek wisdom in myths, even though some of them are beautiful or inventive.
JLLQ. The story of an ancestral wisdom that we have lost and that could be recovered for our greater good is itself a contemporary myth. However, the mythologist's work does not aim to revive old myths, nor to defend this or that current mythology, but to study them from an anthropological perspective, in order to better understand humanity in its unity and diversity, from its origins to the present day.
"The story of an ancestral wisdom that we have lost and that could be recovered for our own good is itself a contemporary myth. »

[Anonymous No.15695968]

>>15695964
What would you recommend to someone interested in comparative mythology?
YB. To break away from people's perception of their own myths. Learn as many languages as possible. To understand history, i.e. to be able to locate in time and space the major cultural and demographic processes, from the emergence of Africa to the spread of Islam or the formation of the Ottoman Empire. To know the linguistic map of the world. To master mathematical statistics. And acquire the means to acquire as many books and articles as possible.
JLLQ. When, at the age of 13, Georges Dumézil asked this question to the father of one of his classmates, Michel Bréal, the great philologist and mythologist who introduced Indo-European comparative grammar to France, he replied: "Above all, learn English and German perfectly; with that you will be able to decipher most bibliographies. "Dumézil followed this advice to the letter, learning how to "handle" some thirty other languages. Bréal's advice is always in season, but I would gladly add Russian and at least one Oriental language.
Jean-Loïc Le Quellec is director of research at the CNRS Institute of African Worlds. He co-authored with Bernard Sergent the Dictionnaire critique de mythologie (CNRS Editions, 2017). Yuri Berezkin is professor of anthropology at the European University of Saint Petersburg. He has published Mythes du vieux et du nouveau monde (in Russian, Astrel, 2009).

[Anonymous No.15695979]

>>15695934
>>15695940
>>15695947
>>15695952
>>15695957
>>15695964
>>15695968
Don't care, still riding the tiger.

[Anonymous No.15695995]

bro we’re not gonna do your anthropology homework for you

[Anonymous No.15696000]

>>15695979
>>15695995
The IQ of this board

[Anonymous No.15696208]

Tired, but I'm interested in reading this over later.

[Anonymous No.15696247]

The myths were spread from Atlantis' time.

[Anonymous No.15696255]

The idea that all myth sprang from a small group of human beings and evolved overtime is not different from what any of the traditionalists believe.

[Anonymous No.15696257]

>>15695934
>Jung, Evola, Guenon : GAME OVER
No need for "cutting-edge technologies" to know that those three are total pseuds.

[Anonymous No.15696264]

>>15695934
Dont care mate. Christ is Lord and not myth

[Anonymous No.15696272]

>>15696257
Evola and Jung I agree, Guenon is fine if you don't come into him with the mindset that he destroyed all of Western thought and you need confirmation bias.

[Anonymous No.15696279]

>>15696264
The primordial tradition was known by Adam and passed down to his decendants who either corrupted or left it behind (Hence why there are so many false religions) or preserved it (Orthod Christianity)

[Anonymous No.15696287]

>>15696279
Orthodox*

[Anonymous No.15696288]

>>15696255
Yeah I don't exactly know what he's arguing. He destroys Jung's conception of archetypes, sure, but who hasn't? It doesn't change the fact that these civilizations have chosen to stick with these myths rather than abandon them.

[Anonymous No.15696299]

>>15695934
>which would explain the correspondence of human myths
You know what else explains correspondence?
Nature.
Human migration.
>As might be expected, it was only magical thinking.
It was a romantic idea during the eras of Classical civilization, it is even an understandable thing to believe by the time of the Renaissance, with Prisca Theologia.
But we should have already known better by the time Theosophy came about, people alive today have no excuse at all.

Jung still holds relevance though, because he's not just some new-age spiritualist - he stripped archetypes and symbology to the bone.

[Anonymous No.15696307]

>what if cultures had more contact than we first thought?


okay

Still does not explain why the same stories are so enduring.

[Anonymous No.15696360]

>>15696299
>Jung still holds relevance though
To whom in what regard? What wisdom you could have garnered from his profession has long since passed. He is a figment of the past, and the predecessors of his field acknowledge this.
>because he's not just some new-age spiritualist
He is THE New Ageist.

[Anonymous No.15696364]

>>15696307
Dude, what? Why wouldn't it?
People literally preserved the same exact words from Scandinavia to Persia, separated by thousands of miles and years.
They'd have necessarily had to stay enduring if there was a primordial tradition to begin with.

[Anonymous No.15696371]

>>15696360
I'm not going to sit here and enable you making a fool of yourself anon.

[Anonymous No.15696399]

>>15696371
I admit I'm typing from a very biased perspective because I don't buy psychoanalysis even a little bit, but even I know the science behind him and his contemporary Freud have been completely debunked, so all that's left is the unfalsifiable mysticism.

[Anonymous No.15696544]

>>15695934
Based, thanks for translating.

[Anonymous No.15696601]

>>15696364

Why would you preserve the words and integrate outside stories it into your myth REPEATEDLY across ALL CULTURES for THOUSANDS of years? Evem religon and politics aren't that pervasive.

[Anonymous No.15696630]

>>15696601
>Evem religon and politics aren't that pervasive.
Clearly they are, because thats what happened.
You probably use 10,000 year old words every day and you have no idea. Us calling Syria by that name is still a carryover from Aesirs, Ashurs, etc.

[Anonymous No.15696632]

>>15696307
>Still does not explain why the same stories are so enduring.
Because they didn't have good entertainment like the Marvel Cinematic Universe

[Anonymous No.15696758]

>>15696255
Read before posting faggot

[Anonymous No.15697317]

Then why can a myth be reproduced in clinical conditions by a patient without awareness of such myths? How about you guys read Jung. This is what you are missing out on:

"[105] About 1906 I came across a very curious delusion in a paranoid schizophrenic who had been interned for many years. The patient had suffered since his youth and was incurable. He had been educated at a State school and been employed as a clerk in an office. He had no special gifts, and I myself knew nothing of mythology or archaeology in those days, so the situation was not in any way suspect. One day I found the patient standing at the window, wagging his head and blinking into the sun. He told me to do the same, for then I would see something very interesting. When I asked him what he saw, he was astonished that I could see nothing, and said: “Surely you see the sun’s penis—when I move my head to and fro, it moves too, and that is where the wind comes from.” Naturally I did not understand this strange idea in the least, but I made a note of it. Then about four years later, during my mythological studies, I came upon a book by the late Albrecht Dieterich,5 the well-known philologist, which threw light on this fantasy. The work, published in 1910, deals with a Greek papyrus in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Dieterich believed he had discovered a Mithraic ritual in one part of the text. The text is undoubtedly a religious prescription for carrying out certain incantations in which Mithras is named. It comes from the Alexandrian school of mysticism and shows affinities with certain passages in the Leiden papyri and the Corpus Hermeticum. In Dieterich’s text we read the following directions:

Draw breath from the rays, draw in three times as strongly as you can and you will feel yourself raised up and walking towards the height, and you will seem to be in the middle of the aerial region.… The path of the visible gods will appear through the disc of the sun, who is God my father. Likewise the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind. But if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east, you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction."

[Anonymous No.15697359]

>>15695934
>Implying that knowledge needs to be true for it to be worth knowing

[Anonymous No.15697384]

Myths are just the future broadcasting itself in the mind of the dead

[Anonymous No.15697433]

>>15695934
This reads to me like "scientists prove farts smell bad"
Like I appreciate the diligence but everyone already knew that.

[Anonymous No.15697467]

>>15697317
>two schizophrenics had a similar delusion therefore the delusion must be encoded into our DNA!