I’m reading Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols at the same time as another YouTuber. It’s not my first foray into Jung’s thinking; I read through Hall and Nordby’s A Primer of Jungian Psychology while living in a hotel in India, which was almost 7 years ago, but I filled it with notes, mostly stuff I disagreed with. What I found annoying was how much of Jung’s psychology was an attempt to sublimate Biblical texts to the same level as other myths.
Of course, we can read the Jonah story, and all Biblical stories, in many ways. I find the Pardes exegetical approach very insightful, in that it offers 4 levels of meaning. The simplest is called the Peshat reading, which is the plain text reading. The text says Jonah was thrown off a boat and prayed in the belly of a whale, and one might simply settle for believing this is literally what happened to a man named Jonah. Lesson: by having faith, anything is possible, even living in the belly of a whale for 3 days.
The next level is the Remez reading, which looks at the allegorical, deeper meaning. There might be numerology in it. 3 days in the whale might symbolize the Trinity, or it might anticipate the amount of time Jesus stayed in the tomb before the Resurrection, or whatever. To the Jungian, the Remez reading reveals the moral: “If we want to experience new life, we have to face our fears, the shadow, symbolized by the deep waters and the whale.”
The Derash is the comparative approach. Here, Jungians can weaponize comparative mythology to demonstrate that the Bible is on the same level of mythmaking as the Bhagavad-Gita, The Iliad, or any other old wives’ tale. Frazer claimed that an “equally veracious” story of the Jonah tale is told by the Windesi in Northern New Guinea:
They say that the inhabitants of the island of Jop formerly dwelt at Batewaar. One day five of them rowed in a canoe across to Waropen to fetch sago. But out on the high sea a whale swallowed them, canoe and all, and they sank with the fish to the bottom. As they sat in the fish’s belly, they cut slices of its liver and guts, hacked the canoe in pieces, and, lighting a fire, roasted the liver and guts and ate them. But the fish, thus mangled in its vitals, died, and its carcass drifted to shore. Thereupon, the men, sitting in the fish’s belly, heard the cry of a hornbill. They said, “Is that land?” They opened the fish’s snout, they saw that it was land, and they went forth. Then the bird came to them and said, “I did it ; it is my doing that you people are still alive. Go now home; fetch your people and dwell on this island.” So to sea they went, fetched their people, and took up their abode on the island. That is why the inhabitants of the island of Jop do not eat any hornbills.1
Jungianism often combines both the Remez and the Derash methods to find similarities between the symbol as it appears in other texts. Hans Biedermann’s Dictionary of Symbolism states that the whale is an ongoing theme in other myths:
Traditionally, the sea monster Cetus that Perseus slew to free the princess Andromeda has been thought of as a whale, as has the “great fish” that swallowed Jonah… The legend of St. Brandan (Navigatio Sancti Brandani) includes the Sinbad-like scene in which the sea-faring monks end u on the back of a sleeping whale. … “it plunges suddenly under water and pulls the ship down into the depths of the sea” – a fate which Brandan and his brothers are spared. “The same thing happens to those who know nothing of the devil and his wiles. … He pulls them down into the fiery depths of hell.” … “This is also the fate of those whose faith is not steadfast, who give themselves over to every passing desire, following every temptation, until the devil suddenly swallows them up” [Unterkircher].2
Jordan Peterson compares the whale to any number of mythological symbols that destroy, aka “the Terrible mother”:
The ultimate or archetypal representation of the original “threatened” state is the unselfconscious (but “incomplete”) paradise that existed prior to the “fall” of humanity. More prosaically, that state is the innocence and potential of childhood, the glory of the past, the strength of the well-ruled kingdom, the power of the city, the stability, wealth and happiness of the family. The most primordial threat is the sudden (re)appearance or discovery of one of the manifestations of the Terrible Mother: a flood, an earthquake, a war, a monster (some type of dragon), a fish, a whale – anything unpredictable or unexpected that destroys, devours, traps, engulfs, dismembers, tortures, terrifies, weakens, mystifies, entrances, smothers or poisons (this is a partial list). The hero, product of divine parentage and miraculous birth, survivor of a dangerous childhood, faces the Terrible Mother in single combat and is devoured. He is swallowed by a great fish, or snake, or whale, and spends time underground, in the dark, in the winter, in the kingdom of the dead, or in hell; faces a dragon, a gorgon, a witch or temptress; is inundated by water, by fire, by storm, by dangerous animals; is tormented, buried alive, mesmerized, dismembered, disemboweled and deluded. He defeats the monster, freeing those who had been previously defeated, and gains or regains a lost or previously undiscovered object of value, a (virginal) woman or a or a treasure. Much older, much wiser, he returns home, transformed in character, bearing what he has gained, and reunites himself triumphantly with his community, which is much enriched – or even utterly transformed – by his fortune.3
Peterson also compares the whale of Jonah to that of Moby Dick:
Moby Dick is as profound a treatment as modern literature affords of the leviathan symbolism of the Bible, the titanic-demonic force that raises Egypt and Babylon to greatness and then hurls them into nothingness; that is both an enemy of God outside the creation and, as notably in Job, a creature within it of whom God is rather proud. The leviathan is revealed to Job as the ultimate mystery of God’s Ways, the “king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:34), of whom Satan himself is merely an instrument.4
The Jungian analysis can be a never-ending game of symbology. One can then connect the whale to a dragon, the dragon to the waters, and the water back to the whale; or the whale to the darkness of the water, to suffocation, to being smothered by the Terrible Mother… etc.
René Girard also leaned on a symbolic reading of Jonah, but he read the symbols differently: to him, Jonah is a symbolic telling of human sacrifice done by the crowd:
The ship represents the community, the tempest the sacrificial crisis. The jettisoned cargo is the cultural system that has abandoned its distinctions. The fact that everybody calls out to his own particular god indicates a breakdown in the religious order. The floundering ship can be compared to the city of Nineveh, threatened with destruction unless its people repent. The forms may vary, but the crisis is always the same. The passengers cast lots to determine who is responsible for the crisis. Chance can always be trusted to reveal the truth, for it reflects the will of the divinity. The lot designates Jonah, who proceeds to confess his culpability. …
What we see here is a reflection of the sacrificial crisis and its resolution. The victim is chosen by lot; his expulsion saves the community as represented by the ship’s crew; and a new god is acknowledged through the crew’s sacrifice to the Lord whom they did not know before. Taken in isolation this story tells us little, but when seen against the backdrop of our whole discussion, each detail acquires significance.5
There’s one last level to reading, the Sod, which seeks the hidden or esoteric meaning. While I can’t claim to be operating anywhere near a Sod level, and I’m not even on the same level as the folks over at thetorah.com, I follow their style of inquiry for stories like this. To me, what becomes clear from this reading is that Jonah is a composite document with two coats of paint:
- Original (true story): A storm hits a ship, Jonah is blamed (Jonah 1:4-11) and is thrown into the water as a human sacrifice (vv. 13-14), likely against his will.
- Paint Layer 1 (myth): Jonah tells them to throw him in (v. 12), and Jonah’s death calms the sea (v. 15). This myth upholds the institution of human sacrifice in the event of a crisis
- Paint Layer 2 (Hebraic version): Jonah is given personality (vv. 1-3), the killers thank Yahweh (v. 16), and Jonah is kept alive in the whale (v. 17).6
The Hebraic author may have taken a true story, or a local myth, and or simply used the same mythical theme, to write a spoof about the sea god. (Also see Frazer’s breakdown of the Samson theme in The Golden Bough, where the man with secret powers is traditionally a villainous wizard who must be killed, but the book of Judges flips the script and turns Samson from an evil wizard into a lovable protagonist.) The Hebraic author thereby de-fangs human sacrifice, making it into a complete joke. Of course you can’t calm a storm by murdering a man! But the sailors aboard the ship believe this idiotic theory; they are the true believers. We are laughing at them. Comedy as science, ladies and gentlemen.
Whatever form the Sod takes, I assume it doesn’t give a damn about the symbolism of the whale or the water. Jonah could have just as easily been thrown into a volcano, or into a lion’s den, oh wait Daniel does this too… Perhaps at the most basic level, the Sod simply de-mythologizes. Of course, the story can be later re-mythologized or weaponized against Jews themselves7, but that’s not our problem. We simply seek the truth.
For me, a self-styled Euhemerist, the whale is a comedic prop revealing the lunacy of human sacrifice. It’s a scientific tool. The Euhemerist is a forensic scientist; the story can be pulled apart, its text analyzed to find fissures, to know why the author wrote it. But this Euhemeristic approach seems to irritate many people. Myth should be a firm social glue, but in comes Euhemerism as an acetone to the bonds of myth. The spoof operates the same way in revealing that the myth (or ritual) is stupid at its roots, and we only do rituals because everyone else is doing them. You risk being ostracized by shining a light on the stupidity of the inside; maybe you’ll even be wrong and have to do a bit of an apology tour, but that’s a small price to pay for seeking objective truth
The Jungian seems perturbed at the idea of myth-breaking. There seems to be more of an emphasis on getting at one’s personal story and meaning. For the Jungian, Jonah’s whale represents one’s deepest fears, or the smothering mother. Perhaps the Jungian isn’t as concerned as to why the story was written; all that matters is what it means to the reader. And that’s fine! The Jungian is a dream and symbol interpreter. But what exactly does Jungianism seek? On the one hand, it attempts to interpret symbols. On the other, these symbols are often too far removed to understand. In Man and His Symbols, Jung claims that the archetypes of the brain evolved too long ago for us to know their original roots. He states that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to understanding signs, but then the book goes on to decode the meaning of the number four. The number four. (Wasn’t that the meaning of life somewhere?)
The ROBA Hypothesis would dispute Jung’s claim that our cognition goes too far back to understand its archetypes fully. Rather, we needed to have the capacity for reciprocal, object-based aggression (ROBA) before we had any archetypes. This would have been the big bang of cognition, producing language, kinship, religion, and yes, the archetypes (at least as we know them), possibly all at once.
To say that the archetypes are too old to trace indicates an unwillingness to question the dated cosmology which says we gradually evolved from an animal, which says that our cognition gradually evolved from primate thought. The component features approach would seem to work here: we can trace various intelligent traits from chimpanzees like tool-making and “communication.” But there is no transition point from ROBA to animal combat; either we have ROBA, or we don’t. There is no “almost-ROBA”, or else we’d see it erupt randomly among primates. We’d have found at least one chimp, who should have become a decent murderer of other chimps using rocks; and he should have bedded a lot of ladies and his killer ape-ism should have passed onto lots of offspring. But in fact there’s no evidence of any murder ape. Instead, we only have Dart’s mythical killer ape, a hominid who uses tools and is a utilitarian hunter before he turns the weapons on his own and becomes a murderous, religious zealot. We see no such thing in primates. They only use objects for intimidation. Perhaps this points to ROBA; but that is not ROBA because the object usage is not reciprocal, does not escalate, and does not erupt into apocalyptic warfare. And it doesn’t need archetypes.
If ROBA produces all deferential forms, including the archetypes of the brain, the capacity for religion, and the ability to carpenter the world into usable symbols, then there is no component features approach possible that can trace chimpanzee cognition to human cognition. There is a massive gap that is not crossed. We are simply, totally different.
This does not remove the need for symbolic analysis. I’m aware that my Euhemeristic approach is what I call “analyze-heavy” in my book, more on the Autistic end of things. A more manic-schizoid understanding of symbols and how they give us personal meaning, and how symbols bear down upon our unconscious, is no less useful. I simply don’t have access to this kind of thinking; ideally, someone on the more manic-schizoid end of the spectrum (who associates more with Jung) would help me author a ROBA-based book on myth and personality. Then we could test symbols from both ends of the linguistic “ledger”. Until then, all I can propose is that we reevaluate Jung and myth from a new perspective, one which doesn’t assume we’re are, or ever were, animals.
I dig into this and more in my book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence, available Jan 2025 on Amazon.
- Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament, p. 83
- Hans Biedermann, Dictionary of Symbolism, p. 378
- Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 1999, Routledge, New York, pp. 182-183
- ibid. p. 296
- René Girard, VBiolence and the Sacred, 1972, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, pp. 313-314
- This is all speculative. Readers should see the current state of Jonah research at the Wiki
- Hurlbert, Brandon M., “Drowning Jonah in a Thousand Genres.” Journal for the Study of Bible and Violence 2 (2023):84-103, p. 96.
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