The Interrelationship of Religion and Myth in Eliade’s Phenomenology and Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Comparative Theology July 12, 2021 Alireza Khajehgir, Susan Izadi Dastenaei, Parvin Forouzandeh
Religion has been central to human life, and theorists like Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung offer distinct perspectives. Eliade, using a phenomenological approach, defines religion as the experience of the sacred, which manifests through symbols and rituals across cultures, especially primitive and Asian ones. He views myth as a narrative of sacred history that models religious practices and reveals the origin of religion. Jung, from analytical psychology, links religion to archetypes in the collective unconscious, seeing myth and symbol as the language of the subconscious. He considers God an archetype and argues that religion and myth interact to preserve each other. Both thinkers agree on the importance of myth and symbol, but Eliade focuses on the sacred as a universal phenomenon, while Jung emphasizes psychological structures.