Jungian Archetypes and the Bible

Though I have surely been exposed to countless examples of intertextual dialog, it was difficult to call upon one to answer this prompt. Unfortunately, many of the texts that are so frequently alluded to in modern literature, such as the Bible, Shakespeare, and Greek mythology, are works that I have not read in a long time if ever. Despite never having read the Bible from cover to cover, years of occasional visits to church and Sunday school have resulted in my having a basic knowledge of the stories and characters of the Bible, and this knowledge and understanding was altered after reading Carl Jung’s essay “Approaching the Unconscious” from Man and His Symbols. In this essay, Jung attempts to explain that the dreams we have are filled with symbols and archetypes, and many many of these symbols are found in the Bible but also predate the Bible and Judeo-Christian culture because they are archetypes that have been ingrained in the human subconscious through thousands of years of evolution.

Jung uses a story about a Native American man walking into a Christian church in England and being surprised that Christian’s worship animals. The man came to his conclusion based on the depictions of animals that he saw on the church’s stained glass windows. Jung explains that the reason these animals have a place in the church is because the animals were actually symbols of Evangelists and were derived from the vision of Ezekiel and that the visions of Ezekiel have an analogy to the Egyptian sun god Horus and his four sons. Whether or not Jung’s thesis about dreamers and archetypes is true, reading his essay shed new light on the Bible, specifically how much the Bible references older texts and stories through its use of older symbols.


After reading some of the essays in Man and His Symbols, I began to think of the Bible more abstractly and as a collection of archetypal texts whose roots can be traced back to ancient civilizations- essentially, that very little in the Bible is “original” or  new, and that Judeo-Christian tradition is more similar to older, polytheistic traditions than most Christians typically admit.