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A C. G. JUNG FOUNDATION BOOK
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© 1972, 1995 by Marie-Louise von Franz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Franz, Marie-Louise von, 1915-Creation myths / Marie-Louise von Franz.—Rev. ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of. Patterns of creativity mirrored in creation myths.
Includes index.
eISBN 9780834840805
ISBN 9781570626067
I. Franz, Marie-Louise von, 1915-Patterns of creativity mirrored in creation myths. II. Title.
BL226.F73 1995 94-45173
291.2’4—dc20 CIP
BVG 01
Contents
Preface
1. The Creation Myth
2. The Cosmogonic Awakening
3. Creation from Above, Creation from Below
4. The Two Creators
5. Deus Faber
6. The First Victim
7. Subjective Moods of the Creator
8. Germs and Eggs
9. The Twofold and Fourfold Division of the Universe
10. Abortive Attempts at Creation
11. Chains
12. Creation Renewed and Reversed
Notes
Index
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Preface
The text in this volume derives from lectures presented at the C. G. Jung
Institute, winter semester 1961-62, as transcribed by Una Thomas. Andrea
Dykes prepared an index, which was revised for this edition by Austin Delaney.
For helping in the revision of this edition, I want to thank Dr. Vivenne
Mackrell for her great support and Mrs. Allison Kappes, who did the comparison
with the German edition and the typing. I also want to thank Kendra Crossen of
Shambhala Publications for her patient cooperation.
My thanks also go to Princeton University Press for quotations from the
Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Bollingen Series XX), translated by R. F. C.
Hull and edited by H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, and William McGuire, and
for quotations from Aurora Consurgens; A Document Attributed to Thomas
Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy by Marie-Louise von Franz,
translated by R. F. C. Hull and A. S. B. Glover; to Pantheon Books of New York
for quotations from Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return (Bollingen
Series XLVI), 1954; to the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art of Santa Fe, New
Mexico, for quotations from Navajo Creation Myth by Hasteen Khah as
recorded by Mary C. Wheelwright; to John Murray of London for quotations
from Sir Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands, 1952; to H. Schuman of New
York for quotations from Post Wheeler’s The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese,
1952; and to Doubleday for quotations from Isobel Hutchinson’s translation of
Festens Gave (The Eagle’s Gift) by Knud Rasmussen, 1932.
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.1
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.2
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
